Offerings vary from year to year. See the Department's <i>Course Description</i> for current topics.

“The essay does not play by the rules of organized science and theory,” writes Theodor W. Adorno in his great study, “The Essay as Form.” For Adorno, the essay “suspends the traditional concept of method,” preferring instead to operate obliquely, through association, “conjointly and in freedom.” It avoids the idealist obsession with primordial phenomena or grounds for experience, working instead in the realm of mediations and artefacts, exploring the cultural garbage inherited from the past. In this seminar we will take seriously Adorno’s focus on the essay as a tool of investigation rooted in history and cultural tradition. We will track the emergence of the essay as a tool for investigation, from Montaigne’s invention of the form in the sixteenth century up through the current explosion in new types of essayistic writing. We will focus not only on a set of poetic and philosophical problems raised by the essay (the role of digression, for example, or the vagabond representation of selfhood), but also on the historical evolution of the form, and its relationship to other types of art that seek to appropriate its disruptive energy (the novel, the “film essay”). We will study a number of major essay writers (Montaigne, Bacon, Emerson, Nietzsche, Woolf, Valéry, James Baldwin, Joan Didion et al), as well as a set of fiction writers who draw upon the resources of the essay (Laurence Sterne, Robert Musil, Jorge Luis Borges et al). In the largest context, we will be interested in what a study of the essay might teach us about our own writing.

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