West Allegheny School District th 10 Grade Summer Academic Pre-work Promoting Literacy Today a Reader, Summer of 2021 Tomorrow a Leader

Dear Rising 10th Grade Student,

Please read the assigned materials and make the explained thematic connections as outlined below in preparation for class work during the first weeks of school and to allow for meaningful instruction and involvement from the first day of school.

Highlights of High School ELA Summer Pre-work • Students who need assistance acquiring a copy of the novel may request a copy through their school counselor. • Students will receive full credit for turning in ELA assignment on the first day of school. • High school teachers Jennifer Jones ([email protected]) and Lisa Carter ([email protected]) are available for assistance via email throughout the summer. • Both Mrs. Jones and Mrs. Carter will be available at the high school on Monday, August 9th from 8 a.m. to 12 p.m. and on Monday, August 16th from 12 p.m. to 4 p.m. for additional one on one clarification, if needed.

Additional Information *For consistency purposes, the ISBN # has been provided. Any student who has difficulties obtaining the text is responsible for making alternative arrangements by reaching out their school counselor prior to the start of the school year. *New students enrolling with the district on or after Monday, August 9th are only required to complete Task 1.

Required Readings Thematic Ideas Anchor Text: • Damages of War: The consequences A Long Way Gone, Ishmael Beah of war are mental, physical, and ISBN#: 978-0-374-53126-3 emotional. Nonfiction Articles: • Loss of Innocence: Children are ““What Memoir Is, and What It Is Not” - excerpt from Memoir: An Introduction forced to contend with losing their by G. Thomas Couser childhood as a result of war. “Declaration of Human Rights” - The Universal Declaration of Human Rights • Memories: Memoirs are a form of (Preamble) - UN General Assembly writing that rely on the specific “Children under attack:Six Grave Violations” - Office of the Special memories of meaningful events that Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict have occurred in an individual’s life.

Tasks: 1) Read the nonfiction articles and annotate for comprehension. You may use sticky notes as you read to annotate and identify relevant connections. 2) Read the anchor text. As you read, look for connections between the book and the nonfiction articles read in step one in terms of the thematic ideas. 3) Using the chart on the following page, organize your connections. For each connection you make, be sure to include the line or section of the text as well as the article, the thematic idea the connection is related to, and an explanation of the connection. A minimum of 10 connections must be identified with each theme being included at least twice.

*Charts will be collected on the first day of school and will be worth 15 points.

1 “The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go!” Dr. Seuss Name

Thematic Idea Evidence from the Book Evidence from Article Connection Explanation This should be one of the three thematic ideas This should consist of direct quotes from the text This should consist of direct quotes from the article How does the evidence from the article relate to identified above. and include page numbers. and include a page number and line. what I read in the novel in terms of the identified thematic idea?

2 WHAT MEMOIR IS, AND WHAT IT IS NOT excerpt from Memoir: An Introduction by G.T. Couser

Saying what memoir is would seem to be the obvious place to begin this book, but that’s not as easy as it might seem. For one thing, the term is used in significantly different ways in different contexts. For another, it has an inherent ambiguity at its core. More about that later.

It may be more helpful to begin by saying what memoir is not.

Memoir is not fiction. Memoirs are not novels.

As a nonfiction genre, memoir depicts the lives of real, not imagined, individuals. Granted, in the West, memoir developed in tandem with the novel; in English, at least, the two genres have enjoyed a symbiotic relationship for some two hundred years. And they remain intertwined. Today, memoirs often incorporate invented or enhanced material, and they often use novelistic techniques. Indeed, they are themselves a form of literary art, and their artifactuality—the sometimes uneasy relation between their artfulness and their presumed factuality—sometimes gets their authors into trouble.

Conversely, realistic novels often take the form of memoirs. In practice, it’s not always easy to tell whether a particular narrative is one or the other; there is no bright line between them. And of course, sometimes fiction masquerades as—pretends to be—nonfiction.

Loosely speaking, both the novel and the memoir are “mimetic.” That is, they imitate life in the sense that art is said to imitate nature. Nevertheless, an important conceptual distinction obtains: memoir presents itself, and is therefore read, as a nonfictional record or re-presentation of actual humans’ experience. Fiction does not; it creates its own lifelike reality. And that makes all the difference.

Memoir’s commitment to the real doesn’t just limit its content (what it can be about), it also limits its narrative techniques (how the content can be presented), as we’ll see in the next chapter. This special relation to the real affects what memoir can do, too, not just what it is. In short, this distinction is fundamental both for how memoir works (the craft of it) and for the work it does—its impact on the world.

For all the publicity and readership that memoir has gained during the memoir boom, the fundamental difference between the memoir and the novel is not widely nor well understood. At least, that is the impression I get from many of my students. Increasingly, they arrive in my classes having some prior acquaintance with memoir. They may have read a best seller like Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes for pleasure, or they may have been assigned a book like Maxine Hong Kingston’s Woman Warrior in high school. Nevertheless, a surprising number of them will refer to such texts as novels. They do so with such persistence that I cannot be sure whether they misunderstand the term novel to refer to any long prose narrative, fictional or not, or whether they don’t grasp the distinction between fiction and nonfiction. I think the former, but the uncertainty is troubling.

It doesn’t help that graphic novel has come to be the accepted term for any narrative, fictional or not, that is drawn in the manner of a comic book. To my dismay, even the Modern Language Association has adopted this misleading usage for the title of a volume of essays on Teaching the Graphic Novel. Several of the narratives in question—such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Marjane Satrapi’s 3 Persepolis—are better thought of as graphic memoirs, because they concern real people and historical events.

Classes in creative nonfiction may also blur the distinction between memoir and novel: at some point the creative impulse may compromise, or even negate, a narrative’s nonfiction status. But, as was demonstrated by the great success, followed by the harsh exposure, in 2005, of James Frey’s “memoir,” A Million Little Pieces, this distinction is not an academic one. Ignoring it can have significant consequences in the real world.

Frey’s book tells the story of his substance abuse and his recovery; the book’s sales took off after Oprah Winfrey endorsed it. But its meteoric success attracted scrutiny, and the online investigative journalism Web site The Smoking Gun uncovered some serious distortions of fact. Among

Frey’s many “embellishments” of his story of life on and off drugs was his inflation of a few hours in the clink into a period of three months—hardly a rounding error! More egregious was his claim that a girl from his town who died in a tragic train accident was his only high school friend. In fact, she was three years older than he, and her parents deny they had a close relationship.

Oprah stood by Frey initially, but many of her fans did not, and eventually she withdrew her endorsement. Not only that, she had Frey on her show and berated him and his editor (Nan Talese) for knowingly mis-leading the public. It was revealed that Frey had shopped his manuscript around as a novel without success, only to land a lucrative contract when he relabeled it a memoir. Furthermore, the manuscript was subjected to little, if any, fact-checking in press. No wonder a minor scandal erupted, with many journalists, pundits, and professional writers expressing outrage. In the immediate aftermath, Frey lost a literary agent and a con-tract for additional books.

The Frey episode illustrates two important things about memoir today. First, the fact that Frey got a publishing contract only when he presented his story as memoir illustrates the genre’s current value as literary property. Publishers are much more willing to invest in certain kinds of stories if they are presented as fact rather than as fiction.

At the same time, the outcry over Frey’s “embellishments” demonstrates that readers read memoirs differently than they read novels. Because the memoir is not supposed to require fiction’s willing suspension of disbelief, readers invest in it differently. First, they buy the book, then they buy into the story. (In fact, on the basis of promotional materials, they may buy into the story before buying the book.) And when they learn that an author has taken license with his supposedly nonfictional prose, they are likely to feel betrayed—as Frey and Winfrey learned to their consternation. Writers, agents, editors, and publishers ignore this elemental distinction between memoir and the novel at their peril. They risk their reputations. (I’ll have more to say about this in chapter 4 on ethics.)

When we try to say what memoir is, rather than what it is not, we come up against the unfortunate fact that the term has distinct, seemingly inconsistent, senses. Sometimes it is used to refer to any account of the author’s life, as if it is synonymous and interchangeable with autobiography. Much of the time, that works fi ne. But autobiography and memoir can also be used to refer to subtly different kinds of self-life writing. In that case, memoir becomes in effect a subgenre of autobiography, a particular way of writing one’s life.

4 And that’s not all. Memoir can also be used to refer to a narrative that is primarily about someone other than the author; used this way, the term refers to a subgenre of biography, as distinct from autobiography. The reasons for this ambiguity are complex. Julie Rak’s genealogy of the term in her article “Are Memoirs Autobiography?” highlights the radical instability of the term as used by writers and publishers, critics and scholars. She points out that it has been used to refer both to first- and to third-person narrative; to private and public, unofficial and official, life writing. Moreover, in English, the term can be both singular and plural, and in French it has been both masculine and feminine: memoir a transgendered genre that is indeterminate in number!

But although the term has been used by writers and publishers to describe (and to title) very different kinds of life writing over the last couple of centuries, it has generally been used by critics to characterize a kind of life writing they consider inferior to what they call autobiography. (The basis for the attribution of inferiority has changed over time; hence the term’s inconstancy.) Until quite recently, then, “memoir” was minor and “autobiography” major; “memoir” subliterary and “autobiography” literary; “memoir” shallow and “autobiography” deep; “memoir” marginal and “autobiography” canonical. The distinction has been invidious—more a matter of value than of kind.

But the terms have recently been revalued. The reasons for this are far from clear. What is clear is that writers and publishers have outflanked and co-opted critics on this matter. So today, ironically, memoir is the term of art, the prestige term. We have not experienced an autobiography boom, but a memoir boom. No one writes autobiography any more. At least, no one reads it.

In practice, the term’s ambiguity is less troublesome than it might be because context often clarifies its reference. For example, when the term is plural, it generally refers to a work primarily about the author. And when the plural term is coupled with a possessive pronoun—“my memoirs”— the book in question is almost certain to focus on the author.

Also, when it is used in subtitles, the title usually identifies the text as either about the author (e.g., James Michener’s The World Is My Home: A Memoir) or about someone else (e.g., Christopher Buckley’s Losing Mum and Pup: A Memoir). Or the term may be linked via a preposition to a noun that classifies the narrative as about the author (e.g., Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness) or about someone else (e.g., Augusten Burroughs’s A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father). When the linked noun refers to a thing (such as a job, a discrete period of the author’s life, or a disease or disability) the narrative is about the writer; when it refers to a second party, of course, it is about another person.

It may help, too, to remember that the term derives from the French word for memory. This may serve as a mnemonic for understanding memoir as a variety of autobiography; calling a narrative about yourself a memoir usually signals that it is based primarily on memory, a notoriously unreliable and highly selective faculty. In turn, this creates the expectation that the narrative may be impressionistic and subjective rather than authoritatively fact based.

At the same time, the root of the term may also help to delineate memoir as a subgenre of biography: whereas biography can be about anyone who has ever existed, memoir can only concern someone known to, and remembered by, the author. And being based on memory rather than research, a memoir will necessarily be very different from a formal biography. It will be, or resemble, a reminiscence, consisting of personal recollections. 5 Some of the term’s ambiguity stems from the fact that practice pre-cedes nomenclature. This is the case with most generic terms, which are typically invented after the fact to categorize existing (and evolving) modes of writing. Generic terminology always plays catch-up. And it is therefore always imprecise. Moreover, it should be used not to classify but to clarify individual narratives—not to determine definitively what they are (they may be more than one thing at a time!) but to come to terms with what they are trying to do, to understand how they work and how they seek to affect the world.

Let me suggest two distinct, complementary ways of conceptualizing the range of written narratives that are referred to as memoir. The first is to think of them as situated on a continuum. At one end of the continuum are those that focus on their authors, at the other, those that focus on someone else. As indicated before, narratives at both extremes of the continuum may be called memoir, even though the former are variants of autobiography and the latter of biography. The point of thinking of them as arranged on a continuum is that, although there is an important conceptual distinction between writing about yourself and writing about another person, memoirs do not always do just one or the other. Indeed, in practice, it is difficult to do one without doing the other.

Even a biography of someone the author never met has an autobiographical dimension—because the choice of a subject and the author’s attitude toward him or her always reveal something important about the biographer. So, too, autobiography is also always somewhat biographical because we are formed as individuals in and by relationships, and we exist within social networks. In life, and therefore in life writing, we are always characters in others’ narratives, and our own narratives always involve other people. Just as no person is an island, no autobiography is a one-person show.

The term relational is now used to refer to narrative that arises from, and is primarily concerned with, an intimate relationship. The most com-mon such relationships are those between siblings, between partners, and between parents and children. Such writing may be hard to categorize according to the rubrics offered earlier precisely because it is located in the middle of the continuum. This should not surprise us, or dismay us; again, terminology follows practice. Furthermore, categorization is not an end in itself but a means to understanding what one is reading in the interest of responding appropriately.

Because most early parenting is done by women, defining oneself in terms of relatedness to another may be more typical of females, who form their identities initially in relation to a parent of the same sex. Defining one-self in distinction to others may be more typical of males, who form their identities initially in relation to a parent of the opposite sex. Not surprisingly, then, it was feminist critics who first drew attention to relationality as a characteristic of life writing. They located it, or emphasized its presence, primarily in women’s life writing. Increasingly, however, relationality has been recognized in much life writing by men, as well.

In any case, relational narratives are more common, popular, and esteemed today than previously. Narratives by parents of children facing special problems—such as disease, disability, or substance abuse—have proliferated. Thus, some of the first AIDS memoirs were by grieving parents of gay sons. And today, narratives by parents of children with autism make up a large body of literature. From the other end of the parent-child relation, narratives of parents by their grown children are increasingly common. A rapidly expanding subgenre comprises adult children’s stories of parents with

6 Alzheimer’s. Narratives by romantic or sexual partners are less common, at least while the relationships are intact. Often, however, a breakup, particularly a public one, generates a memoir, as in the case of Dina Matos McGreevey’s Silent Partner: A Memoir of My Marriage (2007). Her husband, James McGreevey, the governor of , resigned his office after acknowledging an affair with a male member of his administration. These examples demonstrate how memoir registers historical events like the AIDS epidemic and how it is shaped by demographic factors like the graying of the American population and the frequency of divorce.

Rather than thinking about memoirs as being variants of either auto-biography or biography—as if these were totally distinct—we may think of them as situated on a continuum from those focused on the author to those focused on another. Texts found near the middle of this continuum may take as their subject neither the author nor some proximate other person but rather the relationship between them. Of course, narratives may also alternate their focus between the author and the other. Thus in Art Spiegelman’s Maus, part of the text concerns events in the present, when Art prompts his reluctant father to recount how he survived the Holocaust. Part of it presents his father’s life story, centering on his family’s predicament during the Holocaust, as passed on to his son.

Here the term’s root meaning, memory, does double duty; it refers both to Art’s memories and to his father’s. Much of the book is about events that Art never witnessed and therefore cannot recall; that is what gives the book, and others like it, its urgency. If the events are not recounted, they may be forgotten; memoir serves to archive them for subsequent generations. Thus, memoir can be a repository for witnesses’ accounts of historical events in a way that fiction, for all of its range and power, cannot. The two genres do not compete; they function differently.

A second way of conceptualizing self-life writing may also cut through some of the confusion attached to the term memoir. Think of it this way. In theory, one could attempt to represent one’s entire life in writing. But in practice, obviously, this can’t be done. Life is long (hopefully); life writing, short. Life is multidimensional and complex, sometimes chaotic; life writing must have focus and form. Life inevitably far exceeds the capacity of writing to contain it.

Laurence Sterne’s comic eighteenth-century novel, Tristram Shandy, which purports to be its eponymous narrator’s autobiography, has end-less fun with the notion that life always outruns narrative. As the narrative “proceeds,” it falls farther and farther behind in its attempt to render its narrator’s life. (The narrator’s birth is reached only in the third of nine “volumes.”) Getting all of one’s life into writing is not only impossible, the attempt to do so may be self-defeating. The more one devotes oneself to writing one’s life, the less one may live it; life writing might become one’s life. At some point, the narrator would be reduced to representing himself in the act of representing himself. And while life writing is an integral part of living—and as worthy of examination as any other part—the depiction of the process is generally not included in the narratives themselves.

We can take advantage of this dilemma, however, to classify self-life writing in terms of how much of a life a narrative attempts to represent: the whole life or merely part of it. Traditionally, then, critics have distinguished between full-life narratives and single-experience narratives, based on their chronological scope. Some self-life writers, like Benjamin Franklin, attempt to narrate their entire lives from birth to the time of composition. But the actual composition of Franklin’s narrative reinforces Sterne’s lesson about the impossibility of completing an autobiography. Writing at four separate

7 junctures over his life span—1771, 1784, 1788, and 1789–90— Franklin managed to bring his narrative only up to 1758, not even close to the major historical events with which he is associated. This is not surprising: his life was not only very long (1706–1790) but also very eventful, he was a man of myriad interests and talents, and he was too busy living his life to finish writing it.

Franklin’s narrative also reflects the fact that terminology lags behind authorial practice. Most readers today know it as his Autobiography, but Franklin referred to it as his memoirs: the term autobiography wasn’t invented until around 1800, after his death. As it happened, the term was coined to refer to exactly the sort of narrative he produced: one that attempts to represent a life in its chronological entirety.

And the term makes sense: we can think of autobiography as self-life writing that attempts to do for the author what a biographer would do: write the whole life. This was the case with Franklin. He acknowledged as much by including between the first two installments of his narrative a letter from his friend Benjamin Vaughan, who pointed out, “Your history is so remarkable, that if you do not give it, somebody else will certainly give it; and perhaps so as nearly to do as much harm, as your own management of the thing might do good.” Franklin may have written the first autobiography intended as preemptive self-biography.

In contrast, much self-life writing focuses only on a discrete part of the life. Many historically significant life-writing genres fall into the single-experience category—in the United States, narratives of conversion, of Indian captivity, of enslavement, for starters. Usually they are identified as subgenres by the specific names just given. When contemporary writers devote narratives to particular periods or events of their lives, it is better to think of them as memoirs than as autobiographies. So autobiography is more comprehensive, memoir more limited, in scope.

This distinction in linear scope can be adapted to the narrative’s breadth of scope, as well. Our lives have many dimensions: personal, familial, social, and professional; spiritual or religious; physical and intellectual; romantic and sexual; and so on. Self-life writing may focus on a single dimension of one’s life, or it may offer a more rounded, multidimensional account. The rise of the term memoir has in part to do with the contemporary trend away from comprehensive scope toward narrower focus—either in time span or in “thickness.” Narratives of addiction and recovery, of illness and disability, and of erotic life—these are all single-dimension life writing and more properly called memoir than autobiography.

I hope that the preceding will not only clarify the way in which the terms memoir and autobiography are used but also provide a sense of some basic distinctions among kinds of life narratives—which would exist regardless of what we call them. To review, memoirs are not novels. Rather, they are nonfictional life narratives. They may focus either on the author, on someone else, or on the relation between them. They may try to narrate an entire life course or merely one of its temporal chapters, and they may attempt to include more or fewer of the dimensions of the author’s life. Autobiographies are generally more comprehensive—in chronology and otherwise; memoirs are generally more focused and selective.

To appreciate memoir today, however, we need to see it in a broader perspective: first, as one among a number of kinds of written accounts of actual people’s lives; second, as related to representation in media other than writing. We can understand memoir fully only if we see it as merely one of a large and ever-expanding set of practices people employ to represent actual lives, their own and others’. 8 Academics refer to these practices collectively as life writing. My experience suggests that this term is not well understood outside of scholarly circles. When I meet strangers and they ask what I do, I usually admit that I’m an English professor. If they then ask what my specialty is and I say “life writing,” I am usually met with blank stares. To be fair, however, the term is not always recognized even within the academic world. A col-league of mine once took me to task when I used it in conversation: “We already have a term for that, don’t we? It’s biography!” This reflected his training as a classicist: the English word was coined from the Greek roots for life and writing. But I had to inform him that life writing is not synonymous with biography. For better or for worse, life writing has become the umbrella term used to refer to all nonfictional representation of identity. Thus, all biography is life writing, but not all life writing is biography. As we’ll see, the new term has come into use because scholars who were once concerned mainly with literary life writing have greatly broadened their scope of interest. This has meant paying attention both to existing but overlooked genres and also to emerging ones.

Like memoir, the term life writing can be confusing. One problem is that it is meant, counterintuitively, to refer to ways of representing lives that do not always take written form—at least not exclusively. Thus, the umbrella term is meant to cover graphic memoirs, which rely on drawing as well as on writing. For this reason, I prefer the term life narrative. But some of the forms of representation, like portraiture, are not even narrative, properly speaking; that is, they represent identity without the recourse to stories!

The term also covers accounts that are oral, rather than written. The inclusion of the oral means that “life writing” may be produced in liter-ate cultures by individuals who are not literate, or by literate people who choose to tell, rather than write, their stories. Similarly, it may be produced by members of oral cultures. So life writing is not just writing of a particular kind; rather, it is a fundamental human activity that does not depend on the invention and deployment of the technology of writing. The advent of writing, however, makes it possible to preserve and disseminate it.

Of course, unless oral narratives are somehow preserved—passed down, written down by others, or recorded electronically—the extension of the term life writing to include them does not actually expand the database, so to speak. But it is important as a way of acknowledging that, even when it does not take written form, life narrative is essential to—built into—the formation of individual identity and human relationships. In one form or another, life narrative seems to be essential to human life. It isn’t merely a way of recording it after it “happens.” Rather, life narrative is an important, perhaps essential, part of the way we live our lives. Indeed, contemporary scholars see life narrative, broadly understood, as a means by which selves are constituted in the first place. That is, they see life writing not just as something that literate, mature, self-reflective individuals engage in retrospectively, but rather a means by which nearly all people develop their identities and personalities very early in life. This means that life narrative does not just issue from preexisting and integrated selves; rather, it helps to develop and define them. One prominent scholar, Paul John Eakin, has devoted much of his career to exploring this key aspect of life narrative: its role in the development of the self, and thus the rooted-ness of memoir in ordinary human endeavors. (See especially How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves, 1999.)

The encouragement to consider oneself a distinct individual with an ongoing, unique, meaningful life story may not be universal in human experience. (Few things are truly universal.) Presumably it 9 emerged as communal life developed, but we should not assume that even today it is equally present in all cultures on the face of the planet. No doubt this phenomenon is culture-bound, varying with world views and factors like economic development, the presence of social and political hierarchy, and the place of the individual in any such structures.

But in societies like those of Europe and North America, where—to choose a single illustrative cultural datum—individuals’ birthdays are recorded, remembered, and annually celebrated, we find abundant sup-port for the cultivation of one’s self-story. Indeed, in addition to frequently producing oral mini-narratives—anecdotes and the like—individuals in such cultures maintain ongoing internal narratives of their lives. This activity is a good part of what it means to be a person, to have a life.

Herein lies a key to the significance of memoir. Among genres or art forms, memoir is perhaps uniquely embedded in widely shared human practices and fundamental cultural assumptions. Even in the age of the memoir, relatively few people actually write their life stories, but in our culture nearly everyone is considered to have a story, and nearly everyone tells personal stories—lots of them. Think of all the anecdotes you have told and heard over the course of your life: you’ve been producing and consuming life narrative since well before you entered school! So unlike most literary or artistic genres, memoir is a particular, highly developed form of a very broad-based human activity: the narration of our real lives.

This means that it is, or has the potential to be, by far the most inclusive and democratic of genres. It is so because, again, its roots are not literary. Memoir’s sources, then, are in the ways in which ordinary people represent their lives: in spontaneous, unique oral narratives; in anecdotes that are not only told but retold as signature stories; in personal stories that may be passed down as family or institutional lore, and so on. The point here is not to elevate memoir as a genre (above its sibling genre, the novel) nor to disparage it as non- or sub-literary, but merely to point out what seems a defining and significant distinction. Precisely because it does not have to take written form, life narrative is deeply rooted in daily life; therein lies a source of its vitality and significance when it does take writ-ten form, as in the contemporary memoir.

To put it slightly differently, memoir has unique democratic potential because, being rooted in these everyday practices, it is more available to amateurs than other genres. Unlike the novel, in literate cultures memoir is a version of something many people produce as part of their daily lives. Few of us write fiction—I have not written a single imaginative story since I was in primary school—but nearly all of us “do” life writing regularly. In addition to the oral forms mentioned earlier, ordinary people write their lives in various utilitarian genres—the assigned personal essay (beginning with “what I did last summer”); the college application essay; the résumé and the job application letter; and the terse personal ad, for starters. Simultaneously, we have our lives written for us by others: by our peers, in school yearbooks; by our teachers, in narrative evaluations; by our physicians, in medical records; by our employers, in personnel records; last, but by no means least, by those who write our memorials, death notices, or obituaries. Like it or not, we are the subjects of dossiers not of our own making. Life narrative, then, comprehends all sorts of records of our lives. Most of these are utilitarian and instrumental; they serve practical, rather than expressive or aesthetic, purposes. Many of them are not in our control. (And this makes self-representation all the more appealing to many.)

10 Memoir has lots of other relatives in the extended family of life writing, as well. The term has been retroactively applied to old modes of visual representation, like portraiture, whether painted, sculpted, or photographic. And it also comprehends modes of representation made possible by new technologies, like the Internet, which hosts YouTube, social media like Facebook, and the blog. (Not all blogs are life writing, some are amateur journalism. But most are online diaries, which, unlike written ones, are available to a very large public.)

Among visual forms the earliest is the portrait, whose antiquity testifies to the enduring human impulse to create lasting images that capture distinctive personal qualities. In ancient times, of course, portraiture was limited to prominent people: in Greece, philosophers like Socrates; in Rome, emperors. During the Renaissance, it was used to immortalize patrons of the arts, the bourgeoisie, and, of course, artists themselves, such as Rembrandt. In the nineteenth century, the invention of photography helped make portraiture much more widely accessible, making painted or sculpted portraiture once again a sign of elite status. In the twentieth century, the development of ever more compact and inexpensive cam-eras led to the further proliferation of visual images of ordinary people and the generation of relatively spontaneous and informal images (snap-shots), whose subjects may not always even be aware of the photographer. As photography became less expensive, photographs began to be used as illustrations in life narratives—whether autobiographical or biographical. (Indeed, the inclusion of photographic illustration is one indication that a narrative is nonfiction.) Today, the Internet encourages the wide dissemination of such images—a very mixed blessing.

Similarly, audio and video recordings, first reserved for the newsworthy, are now available to virtually everyone. Introduced in the 1920s, home movies have become more and more common as their cost has diminished. Today we find ourselves immersed in new technologies for recording our lives and “publishing” the results; indeed, we are awash in the products of these new technologies. Camcorders have become so com-pact that it is possible to wear an ear-mounted device (a Looxcie”) all day and narrowcast (tweet) selected moments of one’s life in real time. In any case, some people spend inordinate amounts of time producing, arranging, disseminating, and consuming images of their own lives and those of friends and family. (Facebook prompts members to update their sites to stay in circulation.) There is a social cost to this, of course; the more we produce images of our own lives, the more we expect others to consume and respond to them, and the more they expect us to reciprocate. Life narrative multiplies in frequency and popularity, but the time to consume it (also known as life) does not.

When we consider the motion picture, still other genres emerge. At one end of a continuum is the home movie, made more or less spontaneously on a very low budget and with low production values, exclusively for private consumption—at least, initially. If preserved, such footage is later available for inclusion in documentary films intended for public consumption. Many such films combine vintage footage with new footage—ideally made with the subjects’ knowledge and informed consent (which may not be true of the original footage). And the production of such relatively inexpensive films has become a cottage industry today. An example is Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation (2003), which he constructed at virtually no cost out of hundreds of hours of Super 8 footage, VHS videotape, photos and recordings. Such documentary films also come under the umbrella of life narrative. Indeed, many documentaries today are in effect cinematic memoirs.

11 At the other end of this continuum from the cheap and spontaneous we find biographical feature films—biopics, for short. These are expensive to make, not only because of high production values but because, rather than being filmed in person, the subject is usually impersonated by a professional actor—preferably one with box office appeal. Cinematic main attractions are still overwhelmingly fictional rather than nonfictional, but a good many feature films today are either documentaries or biopics—which is to say, they are forms of life writing. (The distinction between documentary and biopic is parallel to that between memoir and biography: documentary and memoir both require direct access to the subject, but biography and biopic do not.)

These days a biopic is often available at a multiplex. At the time of this writing, for example, biopics had recently been devoted to subjects as various as Queen Elizabeth II (The Queen), Edith Piaf (La Vie en Rose), and Edie Sedgwick (Factory Girl), Howard Hughes (The Aviator), Ray Charles (Ray), Johnny Cash (Walk the Line), Truman Capote (Capote and Infamous), Amelia Earhart (Amelia), Temple Grandin (Temple Grandin), and England’s King George VI (The King’s Speech). Moreover, such films are often nominated for awards, especially for the actors—as if impersonation is the acme of acting. Indeed, Colin Firth won several awards for his role as King George, including the Oscar for best actor in 2011. But biopics sometimes focus on people who did not achieve great fame. The 2010 film focuses on a boxer, Mickey Ward, who would have remained relatively obscure had he and his half brother, Dicky Eklund, not been the subject of this highly successful movie, which starred and as the brothers. (In an interesting twist, within the biopic, documentary filmmakers are shown trailing Dicky around his hometown, Lowell, . He maintains that the film is about his making a comeback; in reality, it’s about his addiction to crack cocaine. And when he recognizes this upon seeing the film, in prison, he attempts to turn his life around.)

Also noteworthy here is the Biography Channel, a cable television channel dedicated to life narrative. In addition, much of the Discovery Health Channel’s programming consists of documentaries that qualify as life narratives. Broadcast television also has programming—notably talk shows—that trades in personal narratives. One could also include much reality TV programming, with the significant caveat that although people play themselves, the scenarios are scripted and often highly artificial.

Life writing can also take dramatic form on the stage. In recent years, one-person shows have been devoted to famous personalities like Thurgood Marshall (Thurgood), Golda Meir (Golda’s Balcony), and Truman Capote (Tru). Insofar as the characters are impersonated by professional actors, these are the dramatic equivalent of the biopic. We can call them bioplays. But the stage has also welcomed autobiographical monologists. Until his suicide in 2004, Spalding Gray made a career of performing personal narratives, such as Swimming to Cambodia and the inevitable Grey’s Anatomy. Anna Deveare Smith has done a number of shows in each of which she impersonates a large number of diverse people associated with a particular event or issue. Such productions are far less expensive than full-blown dramas, but generally play in smaller venues.

It is probably not possible—and it may not be desirable—to give a complete catalog of the forms of representation comprising life narrative. But to round out the larger category in which memoir is situated, I should mention some of the more obvious ones. Certainly, the diary and the journal, private forms of life writing, are important. Because they are usually not intended for publication, and 12 because they have been associated more with women than with men, diaries have not always been respected as literature. The obvious exceptions are diaries kept by men, especially by men with access to power and/or a vantage on important historical events, like Samuel Pepys (1633–1703), member of Parliament and eyewitness to the Great Fire of London of 1666. But even Pepys’s diary was not published until the nineteenth century. For my generation (baby boomers), Anne Frank almost singlehandedly (her father edited her text) vaulted the diary into prominence as a life-writing genre with literary and historical value. It helped, too, to establish the audience for later Holocaust testimony. Her diary also illustrates another important twentieth-century phenomenon: the adaptation of self-life writing into other genres, in this case, both drama and film.

I’ve mentioned the obituary in passing already, but I want to refer to it again here because it illustrates the ubiquity of life writing. Most adults read large numbers of obituaries—in local and national newspapers, in alumni magazines—without thinking of the obit as a genre of life writing. A distinction between the obituary and the death notice is salient. Obituaries proper are news stories, written by professional journalists and published for the historical record. In contrast, the death notice—in the United States, at least—is a personal document, written by family or friends and published for a fee. The obituary is an early, brief biography; its subjects are public figures—whether famous or infamous—and the accounts are supposed to be objective and authoritative. In contrast, the death notice is a form of memoir: it makes no pretense of objectivity. And its subject need not be well known. Like these memorial testaments, other forms are occasional, created for a specific event.

As my fortieth college class reunion approached, my classmates were all asked to produce brief autobiographical sketches for the reunion book, and a large number complied. This is another casual way in which we write our lives—here for a familiar audience at a milestone in our lives. Such books represent a rather unusual subgenre of life writing, the prosopography. Prosopography is the term for accounts of people who share important characteristics. A reunion book is not a classic example of it, in part because the entries are self-authored. A better example of prosopography is Jeffrey Zaslow’s The Girls from Ames: A Story of Women and a Forty-year Friendship (2009), which traces the lives of eleven childhood friends from Ames, Iowa.

Initially a written genre, prosopography can also take visual form. And a good many documentaries are, in effect, just that: studies of a group of individuals coping with the same circumstance, such as a disease or disability, a natural catastrophe, or a historical crisis. A noteworthy contemporary example is Restrepo (2010), in which Sebastian Junger, an American journalist, and Tim Hetherington, a British photojournalist, recorded a U.S. Army platoon’s fourteen-month deployment in the Korengal Valley in Afghani-stan. One of my favorite documentary films is a prosopography: the British series Seven Up. This project began in the early 1960s as a set of filmed interviews of a dozen seven-year- old British children, male and female, from quite different backgrounds (read: social classes). The filmmakers reinter-viewed them every seven years. (The latest installment, 49 Up, released in 2005, takes them into middle age.) The film is unique in my experience in giving such a rich and sustained account of a particular set of individuals as they negotiate their way through a considerable span of their lives.

One of the most humble-of life-writing genres may be the scrapbook. It is so humble that I never thought of it as a genre—until one of my cous-ins showed up at a family reunion with a multivolume bound edition of a scrapbook documenting his life from early childhood to retirement age. It had been 13 initiated by his doting mother, then carried on by him. It was not narrowly autobiographical; he titled it his “life and times,” and he included news clippings to put his life in context.

What’s different and interesting about life-writing genres, as distinct from many literary and artistic genres, is how they emerge from personal and institutional practices that are initially private or instrumental. Confession is a devotional practice—indeed, a sacrament—in some branches of Christianity. (With quite different dynamics, confessions are also found, of course, in legal contexts.) Similarly, some churches require conversion narratives of candidates for membership. Both genres are still produced in their original contexts, where they begin and end. But both practices have also morphed into more secular forms; the contemporary tale of addiction and recovery, for example, partakes of both.

To revert to my earlier comment about introducing myself to strangers, if I respond to questions about my specialty by saying “I teach memoir,” I am often understood to be a teacher of creative writing rather than a teacher of literature. Why? I think because the genre is so new that, while members of the general public may read memoir and realize that it has its creative aspects, they do not necessarily think of it as deserving of being taught as “literature.” They may think that it isn’t old enough, or literary enough, to warrant such academic attention. Hence this book, which is meant to do for memoir what a number of other books have recently done for fiction: explain it in a way that will enrich the public understanding and appreciation of it.

In this chapter, then, I have tried to define and delineate memoir and offer some preliminary distinctions among its subgenres. I have also tried to situate memoir among related forms of life writing, to demonstrate how pervasive life writing is in our mass culture and our daily lives, and how deeply it is rooted in our history—as humans, as inhabitants of prosperous Western nations. Perhaps most important, I have tried to establish how memoir differs from the novel. In the chapters that follow, I will demonstrate important consequences of this distinction.

Couser, G T. Memoir : an introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Print.

14 UNIVERSAL DECLARATION OF HUMAN RIGHTS (OFFICIAL DOCUMENT)

PREAMBLE

Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,

Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,

Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law,

Whereas it is essential to promote the development of friendly relations between nations,

Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,

Whereas Member States have pledged themselves to achieve, in cooperation with the United Nations, the promotion of universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms,

Whereas a common understanding of these rights and freedoms is of the greatest importance for the full realization of this pledge,

Now, therefore,

The General Assembly,

Proclaims this Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction.

The United Nations. Universal Declaration of Human Rights. 1948.

15 Children under attack: Six grave violations against children in times of war

How children have become frontline targets in armed conflicts.

UNICEF

27 September 2018

From widespread killing, maiming, abduction and sexual violence to recruitment into armed groups and strikes on schools and hospitals, as well as essential water facilities – children living in conflict zones around the world continue to come under attack at a shocking scale.

Today, one in four children live in a country affected by conflict or disaster, and 2017 saw a large increase in the number of documented violations against children in these areas.

Armed forces and armed groups are required by international humanitarian law to take measures to protect civilians, including children who are particularly vulnerable during times of war. Civilians must never be the target of attacks.

To better monitor, prevent, and end attacks on children, the United Nations Security Council has identified and condemned the following six grave violations against children in times of war, which were monitored in 20 conflict-affected countries around the world in 2017.

1. Killing and maiming of children

Since 2010, the number of UN-verified cases of children being killed and maimed has increased significantly. In 2017 alone, the UN verified more than 10,000 cases of children who were killed or maimed in conflict. Maiming includes any serious, permanent, or disabling injury to a child.

These violations contributed to the overall rise in the number of children globally affected by fighting in 2017, fueled by a growing disregard for the rules of war amidst indiscriminate violence in countries like Syria, South Sudan, Yemen and Afghanistan.

2. Recruitment and use of children by armed forces or armed groups

Tens of thousands of girls and boys are estimated to be recruited and used in conflicts worldwide. Many have been taken by force, while others join due to economic or social pressure. Children who are displaced or living in poverty are even more vulnerable to recruitment.

Children are recruited or used for various functions by armed forces and groups, including as fighters, cooks, porters, messengers and spies, or they are subjected to sexual exploitation.

The numbers of children recruited into armed forces are rising – verified cases increased four times in the Central African Republic (299) and doubled in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (1,049) compared to 2016. The number of verified cases of the recruitment and

16 use of children in Somalia (2,127), South Sudan (1,221), the Syrian Arab Republic (961) and Yemen (842) persisted at alarming levels.

3. Attacks on schools or hospitals

Schools and hospitals should be protected spaces, where children are safe even in times of conflict. Yet, attacks against schools and hospitals during conflict have become a growing, and alarming, trend. These attacks range from partial or total destruction of schools or medical facilities, to the military use of buildings and attacks against staff.

Not only do these attacks put children’s lives at risk, they also disrupt their learning and limit their access to medical assistance, which can have a lifelong impact on their education, economic opportunities and overall health.

In the Philippines, for example, the siege of Marawi from May to October 2017 led to the destruction of more than 20 schools, hindering access to education for more than 22,000 children.

4. Rape or other sexual violence against children

Millions of children and women around the globe live with the terrifying threat of sexual violence in conflict every day. In times of war, they are subjected to rape, sexual slavery or trafficking, forced marriage/pregnancy, or enforced sterilization. In some cases, sexual violence is used to intentionally humiliate a population or to force people from their homes.

Some armed groups, such as Boko Haram in Nigeria, often specifically target girls, who are raped, forced to become wives of fighters or used to perpetrate suicide attacks. In February 2018, for instance, the group abducted 110 girls and one boy from a technical college in Dapchi, Yobe State, the majority of whom have since been released.

The widespread stigma around rape and sexual violence means it is a particularly under- reported issue affecting children in conflict, but it is clear that this violation remains all too common and that both girls and boys are at risk.

5. Abduction of children

In areas affected by armed conflict, children are often captured or taken against their will, either temporarily or permanently, and subjected to exploitation or abuse.

In many cases, children who are abducted are also victims of other grave violations, like killing, maiming, sexual violence or recruitment into armed groups. They might also be held hostage or arbitrarily detained.

Parties to conflict also abduct children as an intentional act of violence or retaliation against civilian populations.

17 In 2017, there was a 70 per cent increase in the cases of child abduction. In Somalia alone, the Al-Shabaab armed group abducted more than 1,600 children with the primary objective of increasing their ranks by using boys and girls in combat and support roles.

6. Denial of humanitarian access to children

In conflicts around the world, armed forces and armed groups block humanitarian aid from reaching millions of people – many of them children – in desperate need of help. Warring parties often deny humanitarian actors access to those in need or prevent assistance from reaching civilian populations. Civilians are also denied aid when humanitarian workers are targeted and treated as threats.

In Syria, for example, the removal of medical kits and surgical supplies from aid convoys, restrictions on medical evacuations, and killing of medical personnel, mean that access to critical and lifesaving healthcare for many civilians is diminishing day by day.

Since 2010, documented incidents of denial of humanitarian access have increased by more than 1,500 per cent, according to a Save the Children analysis of UN figures.

“Children Under Attack: Six Grave Violations Against Children in Times Of War.” UNICEF. 27 Sept. 2018. https://www.unicef.org/stories/children-under-attack-six-grave-violations- against-children-times-war.

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