The (Recent) Histories of Lifewriting Pedagogies–An Eyewitness Account, Craig Howes
Teaching the epistolary in Brazil: framing the letter, Maria Rita Drumond Viana
Editing and Teaching Early Black Atlantic Lives and texts in the Twenty-First Century, Eric D. Lamore
The (Recent) Histories of Lifewriting Pedagogies–An Eyewitness Account, Craig Howes
Abstract
This conference paper will first outline the assumptions, often unexamined, that informed the creation of Teaching Life Writing Texts (MLA 2007); remark on how subsequent developments in the field, including more recent work on pedagogy, have exposed that co-edited collection’s political, geographic, and generic limitations; and offer some suggestions about what expansive, proactive, and imaginative strategies instructors will now have to adopt to teach life writing as the study of representative entities, as a critical and theoretical discipline, and as a student conducted practice.
Bio
Craig Howes is Director of the Center for Biographical Research, co-editor of Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly, and Professor of English at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. With Miriam Fuchs, he co-edited Teaching Life Writing Texts (MLA 2007), and since 1999, he has managed the International Auto/Biography Association listserv, IABA-L.
Teaching the epistolary in Brazil: framing the letter, Maria Rita Drumond Viana
Abstract
The publishing industry in Brazil is catching up to the importance of bringing the “Complete Letters” of its writers; this year’s “All the Letters” of Clarice Lispector is coming out in December, just in time for her centenary. But publication, either of Brazilian writers or of foreign writers in translation, does not necessarily mean that these materials are taught in undergraduate courses or that they are considered in more than their ancillary status to the writers’ novels, poems, short stories, plays. In this paper I present my practice of teaching the epistolary both in large-classroom settings and as independent studies.
Bio
Maria Rita Drumond Viana is a professor at the Foreign Languages and Literatures Department at the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, Brazil. My research focuses on life writing by authors in anglophone contexts and in translation into Portuguese.
Editing and Teaching Early Black Atlantic Lives and Texts in the Twenty-First Century, Eric D. Lamore
Abstract
In this presentation, I will outline how a focus on editing and multiple versions of a life story yields new ways to teach early Black Atlantic lives and texts in the twenty-first century. I will comment on an unauthorized, abridged, and posthumous edition of Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography as well as my editing of this children’s book in a forthcoming scholarly edition, designed for the classroom.
Bio
Eric D. Lamore is Professor of literature in the Department of English at the University of Puerto Rico at Mayagüez. His scholarship focuses on the intersection of book history, print cultures, and early Black Atlantic literature.