About ENGL 1740 B
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.
Notes
Open to degree and PACE students
Section Description
The essay is a curious thing. It is a site of contradiction that makes and breaks writers and, by some accounts, animates the history of human writing as thinking. In the practices and experiences of many young writers, it is a rigid, prescriptive structure. Yet if one accounts for its historical role and intellectual force, the essay is an unparalleled medium for the dissemination of insight and knowledge—so essential to human learning and discovery as to be overlooked. Since at least Michel de Montaigne, the “essay” has been a medium for not only expressing but realizing “the self”—the unit of being on which modernity has been built. This class will take up the “attempts” of the essay and its exploration of the self and its others. Our reading and writing will explore the self/other relationship as medium and dilemma of consciousness and being. We will organize this approach by playing off questions generated by the terms we so often use to describe the medium itself: What is a subject? What is a body? What do theses achieve? What is an end, if not ending or conclusion? What entitles? Course readings will include: Mary McCarthy, James Baldwin, Michel de Montaigne, Franz Kafka, G.W.F. Hegel, Frederick Douglass, Sigmund Freud, George Orwell, Jacques Derrida, Audre Lorde, David Foster Wallace, Zadie Smith, and others. On a practical level, our approach to the essay will move us to explore, model, and develop our craft, writing and research methods, rhetorical discernment, and most importantly will allow us to have literary adventures. Testing the range of what is possible within the genre, students will compile a portfolio of non-fiction writing that will be submitted at the end of the semester. We will use the class writing culture to develop, workshop, and polish this curious thing that takes shape in the essay.
Section Expectation
Attendance Participation in discussion and workshops Quizzes Journaling 2 short essays and 1 long essay Portfolio compilation with course writing, revisions, and cover letter.
Evaluation
Participation (including discussion, workshopping, peer-to-peer work)- 20% Reading quizzes 10% Journal and short writing 10% Paper 1:15% Paper 2: 15% Final Project & Portfolio: 30%
Important Dates
Note: These dates may change before registration begins.
Note: These dates may not be accurate for select courses during the Summer Session.
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