personal narratives

[kevin at limits.org]

Dave--
Pish-posh, nothing's unrelated to Pynchon.  :)

I'd recommend foremost Nabokov's _Speak, Memory_.  As it is a composition
class, your friend could let it stand on its own, or, if (s)he's feeling a
little more rigorous about what those kids are learning, (s)he could
prepare a brief bio of N. to fill in the more glaring omissions of _S, M_
(as you say, no puns where none...), like Nabokov's father.  At any rate,
_S, M_ is beautifully written, and worthy of a comp. class's attention.  
If your friend is really gung-ho, he could also include N's first English
novel, _The Real Life of Sebastian Knight_, which has something of a
biographer's view of the world.

_Confessions of an English Opium Eater_ might be a little too much for a
comp. class (as opposed to a crit. class, I wasn't assigned it until my
first really heavy class, junior year), but it might be worth mentioning.

Januch's _Conversations with Kafka_ is pretty neat, with it's almost
koan-like descriptions of Kafka (one paragraph anecdotes throughout), but
they should be sure to get an edition that demarcates which sections were
added by Januch in the 1940s.  I guess the important thing would be to
make them read the introduction to whatever edition they use and
understand that a lot of people think that Januch is making most of it up.  
There's also a number of volumes of Kafka's letters, but they're sometimes
rather dull, I'm afraid.

Didn't William Styron write a non-fiction memoir/ account of depression in
the 70's?  I'm not entirely sure of this....

Excerpts from Boswell's _Life of Johnson_, perhaps those in the Norton
Anthology, will at least amuse, if not strengthen, the students.

If he can find a collection of Emerson's letters, especially letters
wherein Emerson is talking to or about Thoreau, those are a real treat.

I'd leave off Eggers; if for no other reason than you don't seem to have
much respect for the book (I myself couldn't get through it), but also
because (as far as I know) it's still only available in hardcover, and
freshmen _hate_ being assigned a $25 book for one day's discussion in
class.  :)

It might be interesting to teach some of the William/Constance/Variable
Slothrop passages from _GR_ from the pov of using biography as fiction,
but then again it's hard to excerpt much anything from _GR_.  Maybe (s)he
could offer them "Byron the Bulb" as a non-fiction piece and snicker.  Or,
if (s)he wanted to be brutal about the fiction/biography connection,
_Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_.

Well, hope you find this useful, and have a Happy New Year.

Yours truly,
Kevin Troy

On Sun, 24 Dec 2000, pynchon-l-digest wrote:
> Date: Sat, 23 Dec 2000 12:16:45 -0600
> From: Dave Monroe <monroe at mpm.edu>
> Subject: And now for something completely unrelated ...
> 
> ... to Pynchon, that is (and no wisecracks from the Peanut Gallery
> ...).  A friend asked me to suggest biographies, autobiographies,
> memoirs, diaries, correspondences, and so forth, or excerpts therefrom,
> that he might use in teaching a freshman composition class.  As
> exemplars not only of style but of form, I'm presumiong, but ...
> 
> Now, of course, the definitive Pynchon biography is well over the
> horizon, and the jury is still out on that correspondence, but ... but
> my impulse was to name the obvious, canonical examples--The Education of
> Henry Adams, The Autobiographies of Benvenuto Cellini and Benjamin
> Franklin and Frederick Douglass and Alice B. Toklas and Malcolm X, The
> Diary of Anne Frank, The Confessions of St. Augustine and Rousseau--some
> canonical countercanonical forms such as slave and captivity narratives,
> some more contemporary examples such as Art Spiegelman's Maus (I and
> II), The Collected Works of Harvey Pekar, The Correspondence of Francois
> Truffaut (which a freind loves because it's so boringly quotidian) or
> Dave Eggers' A Mindnumbing Work of Staggering Pretension (and, alas,
> biographically, at LEAST, I AM the evil antimatter DE)--but ...
>