Historical Background for Death of a Salesman

Most of the pictures of 1940s Brooklyn that I've found so far are fairly urban.  The picture above is of trolleys somewhere in the borough (or section of the city).  Fewer people had cars, so more people took trolleys and the subway.  (Note that Willy has a car but Linda does not.)  Without television, movie theaters were common in most neighborhoods.  However, the rise of television would lead to the closing of many of these theaters.


Here is a picture of Ebbets Field where Biff played.  It is, of course, more famous for the Brooklyn Dodgers. 


In 1949, Jackie Robinson had already joined the Dodgers' major league team, thus beginning the process of integrating baseball.  Up until this point, no African Americans played in the major leagues. 


The following site will give you more of an overview of the 1940s:

http://kclibrary.lonestar.edu/decade40.html

For more information about 1949, see this site:

http://www.infoplease.com/year/1949.html

This timeline focuses on NYC in the 1940s:

http://bigapple.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/11/nyc-decade-by-decade19401949the-war-and-the-aftermath.html

Sometimes it is more fun to look at the smaller picture.  The site below contains reviews of restaurants and nightclubs from the 1940s.  I can't get over how inexpensive the restaurant meals and drinks are! 

http://www.tipsontables.com/

Fashion is always fun!

http://retro-fashion-history.com/html/1949_fashion_and_vintage_cloth.html

http://1940s.org/fashion/

http://www.murrayonhawaii.com/nolan/fashionhistory_1940mens.html


Or you may prefer cars.

http://www.anythingaboutcars.com/1940scars.html

http://www.pbase.com/rpdoody/classic_american_cars_of_the_1940s

Movies are always interesting. 

http://theendofcinema.blogspot.com/2008/06/movies-of-year-1949.html

http://www.filmsite.org/1949.html

Here is a link to a movie trailer from that era:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHeiNUbaG7o

Here is a "Hit Parade" of songs from 1949:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6R6QfBXwdkA

FYAmuse, here are some pictures of Brooklyn today:

 Here is a picture of a family in Brooklyn:

Or this picture:

Lady Mary, Celebi, & the Ottoman Empire (part 1)

En 202 could also be called "The Age of Empire and After."  Heart of Darkness, of course, is very much about Empire, and our upcoming reading Things Fall Apart was written as the former colonies in Africa were becoming independent.  With Friday's reading (the letters of British satirist & literati Lady Mary Wortley Montague and the travel writing of Evliya Celebi), we have moved back in time to the 17th & 18th century and to other perspectives on Empire.

First of all, both of our readings are about the Ottoman Empire, the successor to the Byzantine Empire, which had been in turn the successor to the Roman Empire.  The Ottoman Empire lasted from 1301 to 1923 and was primarily an Islamic empire although at times it was a surprisingly diverse and tolerant empire. 

Secondly, whereas Lady Mary Wortley Montague was British, Evliya Celebi was Turkish.  In other words, he was not a traveler from an outside empire coming to describe the colonies and define the Other.  He was writing about his own country.  Moreover, in Lady Mary's day, Britain was on the rise, but it was not as powerful as it would be in Conrad's time.

Below is a map of the Ottoman Empire in 1683, the year before Celebi's death.

 

This map from Baylor University shows the Ottoman Empire from 1798 to 1923:

By the beginning of the 20th century, the Ottoman Empire would be known as the "Sick Man of Europe."  However, if you take a course in Early Modern history or literature, you will see that this empire was quite powerful then.  During the 16th and 17th century, the Ottomans attempted to take Vienna, and not until 1683 and the Battle of Vienna did they give up.

Here is Valdosta State University's map of Europe that will show you just how far into Europe Vienna and Austria are!

For more detailed information about the Ottoman Empire, see this link to the BBC's site:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/religion/religions/islam/history/ottomanempire_1.shtml

Korkut Ozgen has also put together an impressive site on this empire.  Here is a link to his pages on the empire's art and culture:

http://www.theottomans.org/english/art_culture/index.asp

Three or four years ago the Sackler Gallery had a wonderful exhibit on clothing and textiles from the Ottoman empire:

http://www.asia.si.edu/exhibitions/current/StyleStatus.htm

DC's Textile Museum has an online exhibit on Ottoman embroidery:

http://www.textilemuseum.org/fsg/index.html

However, after reading Lady Mary's letters, you may be curious about harems!  Here, too, is an article from the Topkapi Museum's web site.  This museum is affiliated with Bilkent University, a university in Turkey's capital, Ankara.

http://www.ee.bilkent.edu.tr/~history/harem.html

Here is a site on paintings of harem life, a popular Orientalist genre:

http://www.harem.org.uk/

I will close with an example of this genre, Theodore Chasseriau's "Scene of the Harem, Moorish Dame in Bath."  This painting dates from 1854.


As you may see from Renoir's painting from 1872, this genre of art included paintings of Frenchwomen dressed in "harem" costumes.

 

Reading Heart of Darkness (Historical Background)

This evening I'd like to put together a quick entry on the history of and current events in the Democratic Republic of Congo (formerly Zaire, formerly the Belgian Congo and the setting of Heart of Darkness).  I've posted a current map from Lonely Planet above; here is a historical map from the 19th century.  (Conrad worked in the Congo around 1890.)  I was able to find a map from around that time!  It is a little oversize, but look for the "Congo Free State."

 

More importantly, here are some links about the history of the DR Congo.

The US State Department's site is very comprehensive.  Scroll down the page to find historical information that predates the arrival of Europeans.

http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/bgn/2823.htm

On the other hand, the BBC's historical background is more readable:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/1120825.stm

Historian John Henrik Clarke has written this article about the history of the Congo *before* colonialization:

http://www.africawithin.com/clarke/LumumbaCongo.html

The University of Pennsylvania's African Studies Center brings together a number of disparate but relevant sites on the DR Congo:

http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Country_Specific/Zaire.html

For a change of pace, here is Lonely Planet's information about the DR Congo:

http://www.lonelyplanet.com/democratic-republic-of-congo

Here is a picture of Kinshasa, the nation's largest city.

This picture of a village is also from the BBC:

 

As is this collage of scenes from the recent elections:

I do want to include some more detailed historical background about Belgium's occupation or colonization of what is now the DR Congo.  The first article is from Yale's Genocide Studies Program:

http://www.yale.edu/gsp/colonial/belgian_congo/index.html

Here are history professor Wallace Mills' notes on this topic:

http://husky1.stmarys.ca/~wmills/course317/5Belgian_Policies.html

CNN's website from 1997 provides useful information about what happened after the DR Congo (then Zaire) became independent in 1960.

http://www.cnn.com/WORLD/9704/02/zaire.essay/

Howard W. French's 1997 article from the NY Times focuses on Mobutu Seso Seke, Zaire's dictator from 1965 to 1997:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9B05E6D61338F934A25756C0A961958260

A Wikipedia entry on Mobutu is more blunt, stating that "his name [was] synonymous with kleptocracy [rule by theft] in Africa" (par. 1).

This BBC profile is about the DR Congo's next ruler, Laurent Kabila, who was assassinated in 2001:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/1121068.stm

Currently, his son Joseph is the president, having won the election in 2006.

Here are some more recent articles about the country and its current situation.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7824870.stm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7850086.stm

How might your knowledge of history and current events affect your understanding of Heart of Darkness -- and Achebe's criticism of this work?

 

 

 

August Wilson's Gem of The Ocean

  This photo from Syracuse Stage's 2007 production of August Wilson's Gem of the Ocean is very striking, but I thought I'd put up some words this evening to go with it.  Also, I'd like to find a few good pictures as well.

Gem of the Ocean is the first play in August Wilson's Pittsburgh Cycle...or Century Cycle, his series of ten plays, one for each decade of the 20th century.  Here is the Kennedy Center's site on Wilson's cycle.  It's a good, quick overview with useful links.

http://www.kennedy-center.org/calendar/index.cfm?fuseaction=showevent&event=titac

For more information on August Wilson, see this extensive obituary from the NY Times. 

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/03/theater/newsandfeatures/03wilson.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

Gem of the Ocean is set in the 1900s, a period of time that was as close to the Civil War as we are now to the 1960s.  Two of the characters in the play, Eli and Solly Two Kings, had helped to bring slaves to freedom via the Underground Railroad.  During the play, Solly tells of his own escape from Alabama, and he is intending to return there to rescue his sister.  Another character, Aunt Ester had been a slave as well (although she is a mystical individual, being 287 years old and able to travel to "The City of Bones.")  In the picture above, Aunt Ester, together with Eli, Solly, and Black Mary (Aunt Ester's protege), is conducting Citizen Barlow, a young refugee from Alabama, to that city so that he can redeem himself despite a death that he was responsible for.  (At the beginning of the play, another young man has drowned himself rather than admit to a crime he did not commit.  Citizen not only committed the crime but also looked on while the young man drowned.)

The productions of Gem of the Ocean & Fences that my husband and I saw at the Kennedy Center were staged readings.  In other words, each of the actors carried with him or her a bound script; however, some barely relied on their scripts and even used them to substitute for various props.  The actor playing Black Mary, for example, held her script as if it were a frying pan.  In Fences, on the other hand, the actors playing Troy and Rose passed a script between them as though it were the baby that he had brought home from the hospital.  Despite the performances being staged readings, the actors usually wore appropriate costumes, and the set design evoked Pittsburgh without being terribly fussy.  In fact, the same blue/black background served for both plays that I saw; only the arrangement of tables and chairs differed.  This is very different from some productions that I have seen; there the set design has been very elaborate, almost museum-quality.  (See the pictures below from "Jitney" and "Joe Turner's Come and Gone.")

However, as Gem of the Ocean contains much magic realism, a museum-quality set might be inappropriate.  After all, Citizen Barlow travels to the City of Bones in a paper boat made from Aunt Ester's bill of sale, and the play's most prosaic character, Caesar, is clearly an interloper.

Here are some reviews of other performances of Gem of the Ocean.  Phylicia Rashad (the mother on The Cosby Show) has played Aunt Ester; she has also directed another production of this same play.

http://broadwayworld.com/viewcolumn.cfm?colid=1873

http://www.theaterscene.net/ts/articles.nsf/RP/0E50FE60ABD8EB8D8525709D003F8C5D

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06156/695731-325.stm

http://blogcritics.org/archives/2006/01/16/083723.php

DC's Arena Theater also staged Gem of the Ocean in 2006:

http://dctheatrescene.com/2007/02/06/gem-of-the-ocean/


Below is a picture from that production.  The actor playing Citizen Barlow looks quite young!


To finish with, here is another scene from the Huntington Theater's production.  In this scene, Aunt Ester is sending the peddler Rutherford Selig off to find Solly and Citizen before the police constable Caesar finds them.  Here Phylicia Rashad plays Aunt Ester.


There she is with Solly Two Kings.  Anthony Chisolm also played Solly's role at the Kennedy Center's reading. 

Southside by Dream City Theater Group (in progress)

The Washington DC area offers a wide variety of theater.  Just a couple of weeks ago my husband and I went to see international theater director Yukio Ninagawa's production of Shintoku-Maru at the Kennedy Center.  Last spring I saw a thrilling production of Richard III at the Shakespeare Theater near the Verizon Center.  The Gala Theater stages various productions, many of which are in Spanish.  (My husband and I saw Paul Flores and Julio Cardenas' two-man play, Representa! there.)  There are also the Synetic Theater's non-verbal performances grounded in Russian theatrical tradition.  (Someday I have to go out to Virginia where this company is based.)  Tonight we saw the Dream City Theater's staged reading of Southside, a play reworking the story of the 2004 Ballou shootings in which one young man killed a football star who was bullying him.  (The picture above is of Ballou Senior High where Thomas J. Boykin shot James Richardson.)

Unlike many of the theater companies in the area, the Dream City Theater is very local.  Its productions retell the stories of people living in Washington.  The first production of Dream City Theater's that I've seen was The 70, a play set on a Metrobus traveling from downtown Silver Spring down Georgia Avenue past Howard University and then Gallery Place and to the Southwest Waterfront.  Having lived in Silver Spring and spent much time near Gallery Place, I have often seen this bus.  Here is a little more about The 70:

http://www.dreamcitytg.org/projects/the70.htm    

This summer The 70 will be performed at the Atlas Performing Arts Center on H Street.  It will be interesting to see this play in a more final form. 

Here is more information about tonight's play, Southside:

http://www.dreamcitytg.org/projects/southside.htm

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/14/AR2008021401125.html

Washington Post journalist Rachel Beckham interviews an actor from this play, Eddie B. Ellis.  He plays the role of a thirtyish prisoner who befriends Rondell, the young shooter.  Ellis served 15 years, many in super-max prisons, for manslaughter and now speaks to audiences about his experiences. 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/20/AR2008022002771.html

As the evening's performance was a staged reading, the actors read from their script, and there was some blocking but no props.  The individuals in a given scene would stand up at the front of the stage and read their lines while those not in that scene sat in a row of chairs at the back of the stage.  Actors wore street clothes although one actor playing a grandmother wrapped a sweater around herself as if it were a shawl. Several people played more than one part.  For the most part, this was not confusing.  One man played a scared security guard, a character based on former Mayor Anthony Williams, and a corrections officer.  He really was a ringer for the mayor, even without the bow tie! 

The play is not an exact retelling of the events in 2004.  The playwright, John Muller, has added a subplot about a young boy, Yummy, who sells loose candy to make money for his shiftless mother and his family and eventually takes money from a local thug ("Kojo") to shoot Rondell, the boy who shot Pee-Wee.  Yummy is based on a boy from Chicago who had committed 23 felonies and five misdemeanors before being killed himself to avenge a murder.  He became the subject of a Time cover story in 1994:  http://www.gregneri.com/Time_magazine.html  Here are links to stories about the 2004 shooting:  http://www.washingtonpos.com/wp-dyn/articles/A24158-2004Feb8.html
http://www.washingtonpos.com/wp-dyn/articles/A13630-2004Feb4.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60982-2004Dec13.html

After the performance, the theater group held a question and answer session, beginning with questions directed to the playwright and moving on to those directed to the actors.  The topics of questions ranged from the playwright's writing process to the relationship between the play and the actual events in 2004 to the casting process to the lessons that the cast had learned from the experience of performing this play to future performances in the area where the play was set.  Again, this play is a work in progress, so the playwright was eager to find out what we thought. 

I will continue to keep an eye on Dream City Theater's work.

The Rise of the Novel?

Above is an 18th-century illustration from Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, one of the novels that literary scholar Ian Watt considered among the origins of the genre. 

At some point, I am going to reread and review Watt's book, but for now here is a useful outline of histories of the novel from the University of Freiburg, a German university:

http://www.lit-arts.net/Behn/novel.htm

Here is a link to Ian Watt's obituary.  It will give you an idea of the importance he had in 20th century literary studies.

http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2000/january5/watt-15.html

UC Berkeley Professor of Spanish American and Caribbean Literatures and Cultures Richard Rosa made this argument against Watt's history of the novel:

http://www.sobresites.com/alexcastro/artigos/whatisanovel.htm

FYAmuse, here is a link to the Google Books version of Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders.  It is one of my favorite novels, and if I were editing our anthology of world literature, I would want to include an excerpt from it as well:

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&id=RUxV6_7KX30C&dq=moll+flanders&printsec=frontcover&source=web&ots=JfV4uNzvvG&sig=gi2YvP4SNAT2WtJzPjsRk3XNXhw

I've linked elsewhere to Prof. Taormina's history of the novel, but I think that her page on 18th century novelists will give you an overview of that stage of the continuum.  Note that she is writing about the novel in English.

http://www.nvcc.edu/home/ataormina/novels/history/origins.htm

This page from the University of Missouri at Kansas City outlines the predecessors to the novel:

http://m.faculty.umkc.edu/mallinickd/romanticnovel/whipple/historya.html

Could Oroonoko be like the Italian and Spanish romances mentioned here?

I can't link to Catherine Gallagher's Nobody's Story here, but below is an essay by Ruth Nestvold about women and the history of the novel, beginning with Aphra Behn:

http://www.lit-arts.net/Behn/voice.htm

Ge'ez and Its Literature (On African Civilizations pt. 1) Crossposting

While I'm on a roll this morning, I'd like to cross-post a site from my EN 201 blog.  It is on Ge'ez, a language that was once used in what is now Ethiopia and Eritrea.  I realize that Ethiopia is quite far from the Congo, but I also wanted to post an example of an entry derived from one honors student's annotated bibliography.

Ge'ez was used in Abyssinia, the ancestor of Ethiopia and Eritrea.  Now Amharic is the main language of Ethiopia, and Tigrigna is the main language of Eritrea, but both are descended from Ge'ez.  Now Ge'ez is mainly used within the Ethiopian and Eritrean monasteries, which explains my choice of picture above. 

Here is a link to information about the Debra Damo monastery.  It was built on a mountain in the sixth century CE, and it is accessible only to men who are willing to be climb up a rope ladder to the top of the mountain.

http://www.ethiopiantreasures.toucansurf.com/pages/damo.htm

Other monasteries are on islands off the Ethiopian coast:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/africa/1560736.stm

A British man writes about what it is like to visit Ethiopia's churches and monasteries...and what it is like to climb up to Debra Damo!

http://blogs.bootsnall.com/vagabondrick/?p=231

But about Ge'ez....here is a site that gives the history of this language as well as examples of its alphabet:

http://www.ethiopianhistory.com/Ge'ez

This site compares Ge'ez with its "offspring":

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/ethiopic.htm

Could Ge'ez be close to the "Global World Language"?

http://www.valdostamuseum.org/hamsmith/Ogamlang.html

For more background on writings in Ge'ez, see these sites:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ge'ez_language#History_and_literature

http://www.1911encyclopedia.org/Ethiopic_literature

http://wbelcher.bol.ucla.edu/

Here Prof. Getachew Haile, a professor of medieval studies at St. John's University in Minnesota and a political activist, discusses Ge'ez and Amharic with an interviewer:

http://www.senamirmir.com/interviews/theme/5-2001/gh/lang.html

Those of you who are mathematically-inclined may be interested in this writer's efforts to adapt the Amharic/Ge'ez numbering system to include a zero:

http://www.yebbo.com/j/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=447&Itemid=79

Abba Tesfamariam Baraki, a local pastor, is interviewed here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmuJTeSQaAg

Ancient African Civilizations & Ancient Greece & Rome (Cross-posting from EN 201)

After class today, I was thinking about all that Conrad did not know about Africa and its history--and all that we do know, so I thought that I'd post some sites on this topic, for your interest. I've also ordered some books on this topic, so if I get my act together, you may even see a new book review or two here!

Classics scholar Frank M. Snowden, Jr. began the serious study of the interactions between Africans and Egyptians, Greeks, & Romans. Among the pieces of evidence that he used was art from Ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome. He argued that Africans did not experience prejudice from the Greeks and Romans and contributed to their civilizations.

http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities/2004-01/medals.html#snowden

Prof. Snowden spent much of his long career at Howard University. Here is a link to this university's exhibit honoring him for his accomplishments and his influence on classical studies. Here you'll be able to read excerpts from his books as well as reviews of these works:

http://www.howard.edu/library/Special/Excellence@Howard/Snowden/Blacks.htm

Here is the NY Times' recent obituary of Prof. Snowden:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/28/obituaries/28snowden.html?ex=1330318800&en=36f6d8cfe26bf8d7&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

For more information about the influence that Greek culture may have had on one African civilization, the Nubian civilization, see this link to Prof. Stanley Burstein's lecture at Howard:

http://www.chs.harvard.edu/publications.sec/online_print_books.ssp/frank_m._s...

Did you notice that Homer mentioned the Ethiopians in both of his epics?

In 1991, historian Martin Bernal argued that African civilizations strongly influenced the Ancient Greeks; his book was called Black Athena. This argument was criticized by Mary Lefkowitz, a professor of classics at Wellesley College, and other scholars, including Professor Snowden.

Here is a quick overview of the topic. Surprisingly, the discussion page on this entry is brief:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Athena

For a variety of opinions, go to this web site:
http://www.worldagesarchive.com/Individual%20Web%20Pages/BlackAthena.html

Prof. Lefkowitz presents her critique of Bernal's argument here:

http://www.wellesley.edu/CS/Mary/contents.html

Prof. Bernal answers her at length here:
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/1996/96.04.05.html

Apocalypse Now & Other Films

It was wonderful to meet everyone and to note how many of you are involved in the arts!  I was impressed by how many of you are knowledgeable about film, art, and music.  This augurs well for EN 202.  Perhaps we will look at more world film than Apocalypse Now and Raise the Red Lantern.

Because I already have a few blog entries on Heart of Darkness, I'd like to write one on Apocalypse Now.  It's an outstanding film, and you can probably see from the image above how impressive it is visually.  And this image is not the most iconic one I could find!

In case you need a refresher on Apocalypse Now, here are some useful web sites.

I have always found IMBD's web sites to be useful:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078788/

This site is a little more detailed, providing some of the history of the filming itself.  Director Francis Ford Coppola had originally wanted Orson Welles to play Kurtz.  Imagine that casting!

http://www.filmsite.org/apoc.html

For a summary of this film, see this site:

http://mural.uv.es/inaber/plot.htm

Here is Roger Ebert's 1979 review of Apocalypse Now.  (The first version of the film was shown in 1979, five years after the end of the Vietnam War.)

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19790601/REVIEWS/41214002/1023

John Patterson of The Guardian interviewed Martin Sheen (Willard) around the time that the second version of Apocalypse Now came out:

http://film.guardian.co.uk/interview/interviewpages/0,,585052,00.html

Gaby Wood interviews an actress who was in the scenes cut from the first version of AN:

http://film.guardian.co.uk/interview/interviewpages/0,,591320,00.html

A student at MIT reviews the second version of AN:

http://www-tech.mit.edu/V121/N31/Apocalypse_Now_.31a.html

If you need more information about the Vietnam War, this site from PBS may be useful:

http://www.pbs.org/battlefieldvietnam/

The war was incredibly controversial.  Here are some other viewpoints:

http://www.vietnamwar.com/

http://www.vietnampix.com/intro.htm

http://www.time.com/time/archive/collections/0,21428,c_vietnam_war,00.shtml

On the other hand, do Vietnam and Apocalypse Now get in the way of our understanding Heart of Darkness?  Here is a link to information about Fitzcarraldo, German filmmaker Werner Herzog' story about a man who was determined to bring opera (and a riverboat) to the South American jungle:

http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050828/REVIEWS08/508280301/1023

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083946/

Perhaps this film might help us understand Heart of Darkness a little more.

Life Writing

One genre that we'll be studying in EN 202 and that may seem new to you is life writing. Life writing includes autobiographies, biographies, journals, diaries, memoirs, oral histories, and even letters.  Although, at first glance, this genre seems to belong more to history or sociology, reading life history can shed light on the ways that literature shapes how we think and feel as well as influences on literature itself.  Some of the earliest novels like Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders even represent themselves as memoirs or autobiographies.  (A memoir covers a part of one's life whereas an autobiography treats the whole of one's life.)  And some life writing like Harriet Jacobs'  Incidents and Samuel Pepys' Diary is not only fascinating but well-written and worth studying as literature.  For example, how does Harriet Jacobs tell her life story in such a way that it appeals to her audience?!  How does she depict herself, Dr. Flint, and her grandmother?  (Note that although Pepys did not want people to read his diary, both Incidents and the Interesting Narrative were written to be read *and* to change people's minds about slavery.)

Here are some links on the study of life writing (or life history):

http://www.sussex.ac.uk/clhr/

http://www.latrobe.edu.au/english/usba/usba.html#field

For those of us who know (a little) French, this site is invaluable as it is associated with Philippe Lejeune, one of the literary scholars to focus on autobiography:

http://www.autopacte.org/

This list from California's Center for Autobiographic Studies explains the difference between autobiography and memoir as well as outlining the different forms of autobiography.  The audience is someone wanting to write and perhaps even publish an autobiography or memoir, but I think that you'll find this list to be useful.

http://www.storyhelp.com/autotypes.html

By the way, Beatrice Wood wrote her autobiography, I Shock Myself, when she was in her early nineties.  Almost ten years later she actively participated in a documentary on herself and her work.  Ms. Wood was also one of the models for Rose in Titanic.  Here is a link to a site with examples of her artwork:

http://artscenecal.com/ArtistsFiles/WoodB/WoodBFile/BWood.html

However, life writing is not simply published or unpublished autobiographies and memoirs.  Here is a link to a project from several universities in Hawaii.  It exemplifies the work that scholars are doing in this area.

http://www.hawaii.edu/biograph/cbrbiohiariyoshi.html

There is also the Legacy Project, a collection of correspondence between service members and their loved ones.

http://www.warletters.com/index.html

To read some of these letters, go to this site:

http://www.gilderlehrman.org/collection/battlelines/index_good.html

This database includes women's letters and diaries from the 1600s to 1950:

http://www.alexanderstreet2.com/NWLDlive/

Here writers discuss their motivations for keeping journals--and preserving their life writing:

http://fraglit.com/impassio/k-essay.htm

http://fraglit.com/lwc/archives/38

A literary scholar writes about her experience reading the published diaries of 18th c. novelist Frances Burney D'Arblay:

http://www.jimandellen.org/burney/fanny.divergent.html

Lifewriting is also an important part of national identity:

http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/segan/CANLIN.HTM

Of course, we must not forget biography and collections of biographies.  Lucy Hutchinson's biography of her late husband continues to intrigue literary scholars:

http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng211/Lucy%20Hutchinson.htm

I've cited a number of works by women, but one of the most famous literary biographies is James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson...and earlier Johnson himself wrote a collection of literary biographies:
http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Johnson/Guide/lives.html

I really am only scratching the surface, but I think that adding life writing to EN 202 gives us a much fuller and richer idea of world literature.  If you know French, Spanish, or another language, I would be interested in seeing what you might find in the area of life writing!