ENGL108 PO - The Essay as Resistance: Writing, Photography, Film, and the Politics of FormWhen Offered: Last offered spring 2018.
Instructor(s): J. Nucho; K. Wittman
Credit: 1
I understood, writes Chris Marker of Sans Soleil, “that the whole film was a kind of exorcism for sixty years on this dubious planet…and a way to take leave of them.” His film essay is an exorcism of the world, a bitter, critical farewell…but Sans Soleil is also about the world, a visually stunning celebration of that world: at once exorcism and homage; a leave-taking and a reverent, fine-grained representation. That is the tension inherent in the form of the essay, a global, politically and culturally rich non-fiction form in writing, photography, and film that both makes the world strange and holds it intimately close, a form that criticizes the world, and also loves it. If we are conditioned by our education to think of the essay as academic, five-paragraph, caught up in the power, conventions, and privileges of the academy and belles lettres, this course explores a different way of thinking, writing, photographing, filming. Since its inception in the sixteenth century, the essay-associative, digressive, fragmentary; filled with the presence of the author-has been defined and redefined as everything from a stay against fascism to the “writing on the walls of the prison-house of culture,” a way of resisting the deadening status quo, a “matter of life and death.” We will study the history of the essay as a form and write, photograph, and film our own essays in order to understand what the essay is, how it works, and what social and political force it might, and does, have. A course in both literature and visual anthropology (taught by faculty from English and Anthropology), we will be working across disciplines and media, thinking about the relationship between representation, authority, aesthetics, and writing, photography, and film. Assignments will be both written and visual; you will learn to film, edit, and write for your own video or film essay. Possible authors/filmmakers (a partial list!) include James Baldwin, Gabriel Zaid, Virginia Woolf, Yi-yun Li, Teju Cole, Annie Dillard, Audre Lorde, Susan Sontag, Judith Butler, Arundhati Roy, J.M. Coetzee, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Chris Marker, Catherine Chung, Hollis Frampton, Aram Saroyan, T. Minh-Ha Trinh. (TH)
Satisfies the following General Education Requirement(s), subject to conditions explained in the Degree Requirements section of this Catalog:
Area 1; Writing Intensive
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