ENGL 257(S) The Personal Essay (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.
This is a course in creative writing, but much of our time will be given over to
literary analysis and imitation. 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" including
literary journalism, creative nonfiction, memoir and the lyric essay. Throughout
the semester we will consider the particular challenges of this form in respect to
point of view, tone, truth-telling and narrative structure.
Format: seminar. Evaluation will be based upon class participation (seminar and
writing workshop format) and writing (critical and creative essays).
Prerequisites: 100-level English course or AP equivalent. Enrollment limit: 15.
(Post-1900)