ENGL 257(F) The Personal Essay (Gateway) (W)
The personal essay as a literary form has been the site of some of the most inventive and beautiful writing of recent decades; it is also a form with a long history. In this course we will trace the history of the form beginning with essays by Michel de Montaigne, continuing through the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries (Samuel Johnson, Henry David Thoreau, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, James Baldwin, James Agee, Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson), and moving into the present. Of contemporary work we will focus primarily on American essayists including Joan Didion, Annie Dillard, Harry Crews, Nicholson Baker, John Edgar Wideman, Alice Walker, David Foster Wallace, Geoff Dyer, Anne Carson. As this list of names suggests, we will explore the wide range of writing described by the term "personal essay": literary journalism, creative nonfiction, memoir and the lyric essay. Emphasis will be on developing literary critical skills and powers of persuasive interpretive argument, but students will also be asked to try their hands at writing creative nonfiction following the models we have read. Peer editing and revision will be built into the structure of the course.
Format: seminar. Evaluation will be based upon class participation and writing (approximately 20 pages total).
Prerequisite: 100-level English course. Enrollment limit: 19 (expected: 19). Preference given to first-year students, sophomores, potential English majors who have not yet taken a Gateway.
Hour: CLEGHORN