ENGL164 PO - Essay and ExperimentWhen Offered: Last offered spring 2020.
Instructor(s): K. Wittman
Credit: 1
What is an essay? What has it been, and what could it be? The innermost form of the essay is heresy, writes Theodor Adorno. If the rest of literature is the visible spectrum, the essay, for Edward Said, is ultraviolet light. For Alfonso Reyes the essay contains the possibility of utopia; for Valeria Luiselli and Julietta Singh, it can contain the archive of all we repress or cannot tell. And for Cheryl Wall the essay is a fugitive genre, allowing those who are not free to write freedom. If essays have been compressed and standardized to five neat paragraphs in the U.S. educational system, elsewhere ‘throughout history, and across the globe’ they are expansive, resistant, creative, subversive. Most of all, they are experimental: they try things out. (‘Essay,’ from the French verb ‘essai,’ to try.) Essays are experiments, efforts to say what it is hardest to say, to create ‘strange bridges’ where there are none. This is a class in a literary form that tries to bridge public and private, world and self, what is and what might be, to bridge what has been suppressed by history and what nonetheless emerges, unbidden, as the resistant possibility that things can change. We will explore the essay in its many varieties and subgenres: the protest and the personal essay, the critical essay and the satirical one, the essay written to reveal and the one written to resist, the essay as it manifests in photography and film and on the internet. We will read essays and theories of the essay from the form’s origins in the sixteenth-century to its renaissance in the twenty-first, and from Argentina to France, from Hungary to Mexico, from Nigeria to the United States. And we will write, in different modes (creative and critical, verbal and visual, personal and dispassionate), in order to explore the essay’s protean potential to the fullest. Possible authors include Chimamanda Adichie, Theodor Adorno, Germ├ín Arciniegas, Francis Bacon, James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, Jose Luis Borges, Frances Burney, Anne Carson, Margaret Cavendish, Catherine Chung, Teju Cole, Joan Didion, Gerald Early, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Ross Gay, Roxane Gay, Samuel Johnson, Jamaica Kincaid, Yiyun Li, Valeria Luiselli, Georg Luk├ícs, Toni Morrison, Maggie Nelson, George Orwell, Alfonso Reyes, Mary Shelley, Julietta Singh, Susan Sontag, Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde, Gabriel Zaid.
Satisfies the following General Education Requirement(s), subject to conditions explained in the Degree Requirements section of this Catalog:
Area 6; Writing Intensive
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