Study of the essay as a literary form, the circumstances of its use and development, and its fortunes in twentieth-century culture.

What is an essay? Michel de Montaigne, who gave us the name "essai," thought of it as an experiment, an attitude, a question: “what do I know?” The essay has been called “a heresy,” a “strange bridge”; a “voice of thunder,” “writing on the prison-house wall,” a “loose sally of the mind.” Essays have been called “rooms” “archives,” “hauntings,” places “to store mysterious gaps in our systems of order.” The essayist Leigh Hunt, overwhelmed, suggested just calling the essay “a Hippopotamus Entered at Stationer’s Hall.” Sometimes essays have five-paragraphs, sometimes they look like memoir or ethnography. Sometimes they’re “creative nonfiction,” and sometimes, they’re poetry. They’re hard to define, and they’re everywhere. In this class we’ll try to answer the question “what is an essay?” by reading widely in the genre—answering the essay’s call to try, to experiment. We’ll consider the essay in its many varieties and subgenres: the protest and the personal essay, the critical and the satirical essay, the essay written to reveal and the one written to resist, the essay as it manifests in photographs and film and on the internet. We will read essays and theories of the essay from the form’s nominal origins in the sixteenth century to its renaissance in the twenty-first, and from Argentina to France, Hungary to Mexico, Nigeria to the United States. And as we read, we will write and express in different modes (creative and critical, verbal and visual, personal and dispassionate), in order to explore the essay’s protean, impossible-to-define potential to the fullest.

All course readings will be available on bCourses.

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills