POL 210 - Autobiography

FDR: SS2
Credits: 4
Planned Offering: Spring 2011 and alternate years

A study of autobiographies, as philosophical, literary, and theological genres, and as disciplines of self-awareness, self-knowledge, self-deception, and self-creation. While attentive to events, circumstances, and places of a life, we examine and employ varied psychic, mental, spiritual, and written practices that enable one to give an account of oneself, to oneself, to a person, public, and gods, imagined or otherwise. Augustine’s Confessions, Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy, Rousseau’s Reveries of a Solitary Walker, and Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo each represent a mode of autobiographic practice and presentation: confession, meditation, reverie, and reflection. Students write their own spiritual and philosophical autobiography.Velásquez.