General Introduction
– David’s baby
– On Philip Cary
– Toccoa Falls vs. Emmanuel

Autobiography Pre-Augustine
– Caesar in the third person
– Presenting the self as persona
– St. Paul’s miniature autobiographies
– Marcus Aurelius thanks his friends
– Old Testament sources

Augustine’s Confessions
– God and the I
– Starting at the beginning (the very beginning!)
– Arrogance and humility
– Theological reality as context
– The philosophical books
– The self as allegory

Biography, Autobiography
– The inward turn
– Memory and conscience
– Competitive urges
– What authority?

The Enlightenment Autobiography
– Reason and faith
– Didacticism
– The social biography
– The slave narrative
– Empiricism

The Contemporary Memoir
– What should we expect from it?
– The memoirist’s obligation to his readers
– The memoirist’s obligation to his friends
– To what does the autobiographer owe allegiance?
– The didactic novel

Our Recommendations
– Stanley Hauerwas
– C.S. Lewis
– Margery Kempe
– Frederick Buechner
BIBLIOGRAPHY

Augustine. Confessions. Trans. Henry Chadwick. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

Buechner, Frederick. Now and Then. New York: HarperOne, 1991.

Douglass, Frederick and Harriet Jacobs. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. New York: Modern Library, 2004.

Franklin, Benjamin. Autobiography. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

Frey, James. A Million Little Pieces. New York: Anchor, 2005.

Julian of Norwich. Revelations of Divine Love. Seattle: CreateSpace, 2012.

Julius Caesar. The Gallic Wars. Trans. Carolyn Hammond. New York: Oxford UP, 2008.

Hauerwas, Stanley. Hannah’s Child. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010.

Kempe, Margery. The Book of Margery Kempe. New York: Norton, 2000.

Lewis, C.S. Surprised by Joy. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1995.

Marcus Aurelius. Meditations. Trans. G.M.A. Grube. New York: Simon and Brown, 2012.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Ecce Homo. Trans. Duncan Large. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Confessions. New York: Penguin, 1953.