Mary Karr, memoir, literature, poetry, and close reading (25 mins)

[Trigger warning! Mary Karr talks about violence in her life.] Mary Karr, in her memoir of her life, tells us that her mother shot at her husband – actually, two of her husbands – she had five.

This kind of detail immediately gets your attention. It is one of many reasons why memoir is engaging. It’s also why fiction is engaging. In this lecture I’ll talk about memoir and memory, as well as poetry and fiction and the connections between them. Other questions I talk about include, what’s the difference between poetry and song.. and when did that difference emerge? What does it mean for a work to be literary? What is the theme of a work? What is literary about memoir? I’m going to discuss the answers to these questions while I talk about a book by Mary Karr, The art of memoir. [Transcript available for students]