English: The Art of the Essay

In this intermediate writing course, students explore and practice variations in the genre known as the nonfiction essay, attending to audience, purpose, context, style, and medium.

Open to degree and PACE students

The “essay” is difficult to define, generally understood as a short piece of nonfiction prose. Varying in purpose and style, essays may be crafted to inform, to analyze, to explore, or to argue. But regardless of the form and aim of an essay, many experiences, phenomena, and feelings challenge our ability to communicate them clearly or easily. This is one reason why essay writing requires artfulness: because expressing difficult subjects that are hard to articulate in language takes imagination and profound care. In this course, you will study such writing in published essays that examine subjects such as identity, physical pain, and even what reading and writing are “good for” in trying times such as ours. We will read and imitate celebrated writers who invented creative forms of the essay as they tried to make their subjects legible and real to us. Focusing on the “aims, methods, and materials” (Harris) of a variety of writers, we will inhabit their “projects” and “approaches” in order to write creative and experimental essays that attempt to make our subjects equally compelling. Joseph Harris’s framework in Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts will be our guide throughout the semester. Along the way, we will study and practice both academic and creative nonfiction writing that should serve you in a variety of future pursuits and studies.