L381 25328 RECENT WRITING
Scott Sanders

1:25p-2:15p MWF (30 students) 3 cr., A&H.

TOPIC: “The Contemporary Essay”

Recently, the essay has come to be called “the fourth genre,” by analogy to the more familiar trio of drama, poetry, and fiction. This quirky and inquisitive mode of writing was named, and more or less invented, by a 16th-century Frenchman, Michel de Montaigne. He derived the name “essai” from a French verb meaning to make a trial of something, the way one “assays” an ore to determine its value. The term suggests an experiment, a testing, a weighing out. For Montaigne, an essay was an effort to make sense of life—not the whole of life, but some confusing or intriguing portion of it. With a lineage stretching back five centuries and including such noteworthy practitioners as Henry David Thoreau, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, and James Baldwin, the essay has enjoyed a flowering in our own time. It is a wide-open form, skeptical and reflective, ideally suited to an age of multiplying possibilities and dwindling certainties.

In this course, after sampling work by important precursors such as Woolf, Orwell, and Baldwin, we will concentrate on essays by American writers published in the last quarter century. To keep costs down, we will use two anthologies—most likely Matt Kellogg and Jillian Quint, eds., Twentysomething Essays by Twentysomething Writers (Random House, 2006), and Samuel Cohen, ed., 50 Essays: A Portable Anthology (2003)—along with five or six titles from the following list:

Patricia Hampl, I Could Tell You Stories: Sojourns in the Land of Memory (1999)
Barbara Kingsolver, Small Wonder: Essays (2002)
Jon Krakauer, Into the Wild (1996)
Barry Lopez, Crossing Open Ground (1988)
James McBride, The Color of Water: A Black Man’s Tribute to His White Mother (1996)
Kathleen Dean Moore, The Pine Island Paradox (2004)
Kathleen Norris, Dakota: A Spiritual Geography (1993)
Janisse Ray, Ecology of a Cracker Childhood (1999)
Richard Rodriguez, Brown: The Last Discovery of America (2002)
Scott Russell Sanders, The Paradise of Bombs (1993)
David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day (2001)
Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place (1991)
Tobias Wolff, This Boy’s Life: A Memoir (2000)

Faithful attendance and active participation in class discussion are required. You will be asked to write each week a short (250 words or so), critical response to one or more of the readings. In addition, you will be asked to write an essay of 4-5 pages (1,000-1,500 words) at mid-semester and an essay of 8-10 pages (2,000-4,000) at the end of the semester. The longer essays may be either critical or creative. No exams. Three-quarters of the grade will depend on the essays and brief critical responses, one-quarter on the quality of your participation in class.