Prerequisite: First-year students with permission. Topic will vary by semester. Close reading, various interpretive strategies, and research skills will be stressed. Topic for 2012-12: "Life Writing." Life writings are hybrid forms which transform events and people into stories and which create "truths" from experience. We will study selected autobiographies, memoirs, and biographies as art and as social critique. By reading such authors as Lessing, Agee, Campbell, Spiegelman, and Menchu, we will examine the fictive techniques by which auto/biographical "truths" are created. III.W, V.2