Course Description

We live in an age of self-writing. Facebook and twitter facilitate and encourage self-expression, blogging is as common as reading blogs, the book clubs love memoirs, and ever since the 1980s the scholarly debate around autobiographical writing has been flourishing. This seminar will address life narratives, examining questions of history (how did life writing emerge?) and genre such as the diary, graphic memoir, autobiography etc. We will also deal with postmodern critiques of verisimilitude and the vexed question of fictional vs. factual narratives, and asses to what extent autobiographical narration is inflected by class, race, gender, and sexuality. - Course Description

This blog serves as a reading journal accompanying the Haupt/Masterseminar "Life Narratives" at the Albert-Ludwigs-University of Freiburg

Sonntag, 20. November 2016

Charlotte Bronte - Jane Eyre - before reading

Reading Journal - Session 5 - 22/11/2016

Charlotte Bronte – Jane Eyre
“Until Jane Eyre was kidnapped I don’t think anyone—least of all Hades—realised quite how popular she was. It was as if a living national embodiment of England’s literary heritage had been torn from the masses. It was the best piece of news we could have hoped for.” - Bowden Cable. Journal of a LiteraTec
Jasper Fforde. The Eyre Affair

While I have read literature in connection to Jane Eyre – the postcolonial prequel Wide Sargasso Sea dealing with the backstory of Rochester’s insane wife Bertha (of which I sadly remember very little) and the postcolonial novel The Eyre Affair about which I wrote my last term paper (which I can recommend and in which Jane Eyre gets kidnapped, thus forcing the heroine of the book, Thursday Next, to rescue her, whereby she accidentally alters the story to reflect the actual story of Jane Eyre) – I have not read the book itself. Through writing my term paper about The Eyre Affair (as well as the following three novels in the series) I feel like I know the gist and importance of the story already, but I am curious about the actual book and how the Victorian novel will actually be, after already being influences by feminist, postcolonial and postmodern influences, that criticized some aspects of the books, but also treated the source material with consideration and worthy of basing their own stories on. It is certainly well known and considered a classic and I am curious how it is going to fit into the “Life Narratives” seminar, as I would not have thought of it belonging to this category (but I also don’t know the details of the story or the way in which it is written).

      “It is well known, even 150 years after publication. For The Eyre Affair to have any resonance the featured novel had to be familiar and respected. If potential readers of my book haven't read Jane Eyre they might have seen the film, and if they haven't done either, they might still know that Jane is a heroine of Victorian romantic fiction. I don't know of many other books that can do this.“

     Jasper Fforde

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