Mystics & Visionaries: Art and Other Ways of Knowing (NEW)

This course introduces three genres of life writing: Autobiography, Memoir and the Diary. While the Memoir and the diary are older forms of first persons writing the Autobiography developed later. We will first study the literary-historical shifts that occurred in Autobiographies from religious confession through the secular Eurocentric Enlightenment men, expanded to women writers and to members of marginal oppressed groups as well as to non-European autobiographies in the twentieth century. Subsequently we shall study the rise of the modern memoir, asking how it is different from this form of writing that existed already in the middle ages.

Pennsylvania is a state that varies widely in terms of its demographics, its economics and its geography.  With both urban and rural areas and considered simultaneously part of the northeastern corridor, the Midwest and Appalachia, the state encompasses many different political cultures. In U.S. electoral politics, Pennsylvania is the largest swing state which means the state is flooded with national money and attention as political parties vie for its coveted 17 electoral votes. Since it is a state that unlike say Texas or California, does not hold a strong established political identity as a guaranteed “red” or “blue” state, it provides a way to study specific ideologies as they are present in specific localities that speak to the national context.