Length:  at least 750 words (roughly three double-spaced pages)

Due dates:  7.11.14 (proposal), 7.14.14 (rough draft), 7.16.14 (final)

 

We’ve talked over the last week about the complexities and nuances of thinking about the self, and especially of expressing or representing the self to an audience of other people.  The self is always multiple, always an ongoing process, never stable or static; the self is the tension between what is given and what is made, between the aspects of self one is born into and the aspects one creates or chooses; the self is the constant interplay between surface and depth, between what we portray or perform for other people and what we feel internally and withhold.  Identity is personal, but it is also social, conditioned by one’s relationships with other people and by the events that one lives through, many of which leave their imprints on who we are—in one sense I am the same person both before and after some significant event, but in some sense those are two different people.  To present or represent the self is to account for these complexities:  the self not stable or in isolation, but in constant relation to surrounding structures and phenomena and encounters.

We’ve explored, too, many of the difficulties inherent in talking or writing about the self:  the stigma against talking about or photographing oneself (for fear of being called vain, arrogant, superficial, braggy); the difficulty in summing oneself up in a way that communicates all that one wants to communicate; the burden of making one’s own internal, personal experiences interesting to others.  In some ways, imagining about a form of writing that lives somewhere between writing and photography—not necessarily writing that literally incorporates visual elements, but writing that has imagistic, photographic qualities in addition to its narrative or essayistic qualities—might offer us a productive way past these difficulties.

Your task, then, is to produce what we might call a narrative self-portrait:  a piece of narrative writing that illustrates, through narrating some significant moment or moments in your life, who you are in relation to those moments, the way a selfie captures you in relation to the party (or the plane crash) taking place behind you.  Your introductory letters told me some important things about your lives:  the details of your family, your educational history, your hobbies, your hopes and dreams and fears, and so on.  Your narrative self-portrait should show me the self—the constantly evolving, endlessly complicated self—behind all of these biographical facts.  It should reveal to me and to your readers something important about you, about the self and the identity you feel and claim as your own—not necessarily because it tells me some secret about something that happened to you that no one knows about, but because whatever events it tells, it relives, performing your relationship to and your processing of one or more of the important events of your life.

I say “narrative self-portrait” rather than “self(ie)-narrative” because I want narrative to be the tool and self-portraiture to be the goal:  the story or stories you tell should function not just to be interesting or funny or heartbreaking stories, but as a way of narrating yourself.  The plane crash selfie is a self-portrait that gestures at a narrative (why is this plane on the ground? what happened? was she on it?); what I want you to produce, in some sense, is a narrative that gestures at a self-portrait.

I would also like you to include (within the text itself, somewhere) a photographic image of some sort that you’ve taken and that enhances or amplifies your essay—something that functions as a self-portrait, maybe (or not), but that integrates in some interesting way with the substance of your essay.  In other words, not just an unrelated photo of the author, but a photo that is a part of the essay itself.  The tattoo image at the opening of Laura Bogart’s “Rage” is a good example of what I mean here.