ENC 3310

This workshop will provide opportunities to explore the field of creative nonfiction globally, but will focus mainly on the personal essay and that genre’s rich tradition. We’ll read published essays, including some critical and theoretical work, in order to explore issues such as genre, persona, context, audience, and voice, but our focus will be on workshopping student work (including memoir chapters, if anyone has them). Our readings will include some canonical essays by writers such as Montaigne and Emerson. And to add to the wealth of essays published in the United States during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, we will study Indian, Caribbean, and African essayists like Salman Rushdie and V.S.Naipaul and Teju Cole. Our goal is to explore the ways in which the essay has evolved within the non-Western historical contexts. Students have the option of submitting two drafts for workshop, or workshopping one draft and turning in a final revision.