Gregory Eiselein

Paper #5: Autobiographical Essay

"The autobiographer aims to recreate the self-in-its world, not by literal reproduction of remembered facts (a boring as well as impossible achievement), but by patterning the past into a present symbolic truth." (Albert E. Stone)

After several weeks of considering different selves and different kinds of selves and how the self relates and does not relate to one's society and/or one's own ethnic community, you will write a section of your own autobiography. In a paper of approximately six to seven pages or so, I want you to write a narrative on some aspect of your personal history.

What I do not want is a "boring" "reproduction of remembered facts." Instead I am asking you to produce a story or text about yourself, a story which consciously uses language to create meaning in a metaphoric or symbolic manner. As many great autobiographers have done, you might want to use someone's work as the model or pattern for your own; for instance, you might choose to write your own story after a pattern or style or narrative structure or kind of plot used by Cisneros, Hurston, Douglass, Alexie, Cao, Menken, Spiegelman, Bonnin, Hansbery, Du Bois, Bulosan, Phillips, or Hughes. You might wish to begin with a specific, striking memory, and then shape that memory into an artful, meaningful, and imaginative representation of your "self" as it is situated here at the start of the twentieth-first century. You'll definitely need some type of tension or conflict in your text to make it interesting and dramatic. You may want to use your autobiographical narrative to comment on, criticize, interpret, or celebrate some part of American ethnic culture; on the other hand, you could craft your paper into an instance of philosophical self-reflection or into a political statement arguing for social change. Be creative.

You will not have the time or the space to tell your whole life story. Thus select one especially vivid and meaningful incident or a particular cluster of connected incidents to as the basis for this autobiographical piece of writing. Use your memory of specific experiences and your imagination to create your piece of autobiography.

Length: Six or more pages

Due Date: Tuesday, May 4