"Confessional Narratives" Syllabus

By request, here's the meat of my "Confessional Narratives" syllabus.  The standard caveat applies.  I'll post the "Slow Horror" syllabus after I think of a better name for the course tomorrow and address the comments in the Fight Club post when I throw together my lesson plan for Thursday's class.

The confessional narrative is not, strictly speaking, a medium (film, books, television, etc.) or a genre (romantic comedies, action movies, horror films, etc.). It is a mode; that is, it is less a kind of story and more a way of telling a story. In this class, we will examine works in the confessional mode in an attempt to define what features and characteristics belong to it. At the beginning of the quarter—which would be now—you will have to take my word that the works we will study are in the confessional mode; by the end of the quarter, I fully expect, and will in fact be disappointed if you don't challenge the assumptions on which my selections were based.

The most salient element that the works you will encounter in this class share is that they are, in their own way, autobiographical; however, as autobiography is a genre, not a mode, it is possible for works that are not autobiographical to be written in the confessional mode. (We will be reading one such work, Daniel Clowes' Ghost World, at the end of the quarter.) The reason for studying this mode should be obvious: American culture, at this particular historical moment, is obsessively confessional. Be it Facebook and its ethos of “pics or it didn't happen” or a Tiger Woods press conference-cum-therapy session or films and television series “based on a true story,” Americans crave the kind of information that was once only shared in close quarters. In order to discover why that is, we must first understand how these narratives work; that is, we must figure out how they move us before we can discover why they do.

To that end, we will be learning about rhetoric, a word so important to this class it must be bold. Rhetoric entails more than ethos, pathos and logos—the three elements which you likely learned in high school—it refers to all the techniques that an author or auteur uses to make his or her message appeal to a particular audience. In order to understand why a graphic novel appeals to an audience, we must first understand the rhetorical devices particular to it: panel transitions, word-picture relations, the visual vocabulary of film, etc. Similarly, in order to understand why a film appeals an audience, we must first understand the rhetorical devices particular to it: focal length, angle of framing, lighting, etc. We will devote the first few weeks of this quarter learning the terminology associated with both the comic and filmic mediums, then apply that knowledge to other works for the remainder of it.

Texts:

Fight Club (film)
Blankets (graphic novel)
Maus (graphic novel)
American Born Chinese (graphic novel)
Ghost World (film and graphic novel)
Alias (graphic novel)

Comments

[Ahistoricality]

ethos, pathos and logos—the three elements which you likely learned in high school

Either your students went to much better schools than I did, or HS English has changed more than I realized. (or both) And based on my students' work, I don't think so.

[SEK]

And based on my students' work, I don't think so.

Based on their work, no ... but based on what they tell me, yes. In other words, I think they're taught it in a perfunctory fashion, remember the words but never quite understand them, then recognize them when they leave my mouth.

[nutellaontoast]

At the risk of sounding noob...

could you define "confessional narrative" briefly? i felt like I understood until I saw "Ghost World" on the list... which I thought was narrated in a different style...

[LB]

At the risk od sounding noob...

Could you elaborate on ethos, pathos and logos as elements of rhetoric?

[JPool]

At the risk of sounding snotty...

I know you're trying for a playful and self-aware voice, but to me you're coming off snotty, especially in the section that begins, "The reason for studying this mode should be obvious."

[SEK]

could you define "confessional narrative" briefly?

Any narrative in which a primary intent is to create a version of "self" by telling "your" story. I'm trying to keep the definition as expansive as I can at the beginning of the quarter, because I don't want them to think there's a system that'll allow them to "solve" these books. E.g. I could throw Foucault at them, but then they'll just throw a bunch of Foucauldian readings right back at me.

Could you elaborate on ethos, pathos and logos as elements of rhetoric?

It's directly from Aristotle's On Rhetoric:

Of the modes of persuasion furnished by the spoken word there are three kinds. [...] Persuasion is achieved by the speaker's personal character [ethos] when the speech is so spoken as to make us think him credible. [...] Secondly, persuasion may come through the hearers, when the speech stirs their emotions [pathos]. [...] Thirdly, persuasion is effected through the speech itself [logos] when we have proved a truth or an apparent truth by means of the persuasive arguments suitable to the case in question.

I know you're trying for a playful and self-aware voice, but to me you're coming off snotty

It may sound snotty to you, but I'm mainly aiming for "personable." As for mentioning the obviousness of something obvious, you know what I'm up to there: it's obvious to me, and it'll be obvious to them the second I mention it ... but they've never thought about it in those terms before. It's a way of establishing the importance and relevance of the material on the fly.

[JPool]

As for mentioning the obviousness of something obvious, you know what I'm up to there: it's obvious to me, and it'll be obvious to them the second I mention it ... but they've never thought about it in those terms before. It's a way of establishing the importance and relevance of the material on the fly.

Right, it's a question of cultural backgrounds/predelictions/taste as well as ear. This assertion of a presumed relationship to knowledge (ie, "should be obvious"), however, sounds to me condescending rather than authoritative.