An Autobiography Holiday Blog from Megan and Jackie

Seeing as Megan and I have spent the entire semester thinking the same things in class..we figured we should be REALLY cool and blog TOGETHER. So here you have it--a final blog from Jackie and Megan!
A Sixty second overview of 15 weeks of autobiography!
Things we may want to mention:Smith and Watson’s Five Elements of Autobiographical Subjectivity-•
Memory- how the writer recalls events; how he/she accesses the memory•
Experience- retelling of events that are mere interpretations of the past•
Identity- the writer makes himself/herself known through implication and differentiation• Embodiment- knowing the world through the body (senses)•
Agency- the reader recognizes that the writer has implemented free choice in the telling of his/her story
Hybridity•
What makes autobiography a hybrid genre? Auto (self) bio (life) graphee (writing)- a narrative of the self told by the self-Freud’s effects on the genre-Enlightenment’s effects on the genre-Ego-grams (for those of us that actually presented them)-Six word memoirs-Our writing prompts Amneusis-Bringing something back from the past into the present
Gusdorf’s Argument--People write autobiographies, because they feel like the world would be incomplete without their own existences. Autobiography is culturally imbedded. It does not exist everywhere.

-Thoughts from Megan!
A Sixty second rambling of Jackie's knowledge of autobiography..
After reading Megan's post I thought about the syllabus as a whole. Where did we begin and where did we end? When I had entered this class I believed that an autobiography was telling one's life story from beginning to end. It was not spliced, it did not involve creative metaphors, it was simply telling the story of one's life. As the course progressed I became confused; was it possible that a person could write their life story without writing specifically about themselves? Was it still an autobiography if major chunks of the person's life were missing? Could it be an autobiography if it was fiction?!
Finally, could an autobiograpy be tragic, heartwreching, and hysterical all while telling the story of a life? Dave Eggers seems to have combined every element of every text that we have seen before thus creating the most interesting piece of work we have encountered all semester! Plus, its hysterical.