SF-1179 Writing Stories of Self in Society
Every story of an individual is also the story of the place, the group, the larger intersection of identities somehow connected to that person. In this class, we'll examine ways in which nonfictional stories use individuals to represent the larger social categories to which they belong; how we use part of something to stand in for the bigger thing. We'll consider the difference between telling one's own story, and having another tell it about you, including efforts at divisive propaganda in writing, image, and multimodal texts. We'll consider single-author texts as well as more collaborative efforts, like hashtag campaigns on social media. After we've studied the rhetoric others use, students will write their own first-person stories, situating their individual selves within some larger social context. As part of this, students will each design and launch their own hashtag campaign to crowdsource other stories and images to put them in conversation with their own.