Pushing the Boundaries of the Essay
What comes to mind when you hear the word “essay”? Maybe you think of a formula that you learned long ago: five standardized paragraphs supporting a single claim with little room for anything else. Maybe you think of essay writing as a mechanical, rulebound, and unexciting kind of writing. And yet, over its centuries-long history, essay writing has been anything but formulaic—so much so that scholars find it impossible to agree on a set of stable features that define an essay. As the editors of the Edinburgh Companion to the Essay (2022) argue, the essay isn’t a unitary genre at all. Instead, it’s a “contested space,” marked by many diverse and competing approaches. This class is a gateway to that contested space. Assigned readings will introduce students to the outer limits of the essay universe and to writers who have made their own unique marks on the tradition, which has experimentation and exploration at its heart.
Encountering the actual diversity and inventiveness of the essay form will yield a wealth of strategies for students to test out in their own writing—strategies for engaging readers, for analyzing the world around us, for communicating a point of view, for posing significant questions, and for responding to other thinkers. Students will write to analyze the writing of others as well as to pursue essay projects of their own design, using the essay form for the exciting and imaginative reasons that writers have turned to it for generations: to delve into the intellectual, aesthetic, and ethical questions that captivate them. By doing this work, students will expand their abilities for inquiry, critical thinking, and argumentation, and become better navigators of writing for many purposes and audiences at college and beyond.
Students will be evaluated on two main essay projects, one of which can be multimodal, and on their participation in a recursive writing process that includes reading, exploratory writing, drafting, revising, and responding to classmates’ drafts. This course will be helpful for new college students looking to establish a base of knowledge about analytical writing, as well as for students at any point in their college careers who want to dedicate time to working intentionally on their writing. Students interested in reading and writing literary and cultural criticism, creative nonfiction, and science writing for a general audience might be especially interested in this course.