ENG 5933 Spring 2019 Ned Stuckey
Essays used to enter the canon primarily through first-year writing anthologies. The essays had appeared originally in magazines and collections of the author’s work. In those first contexts they lived a particular life in the culture, but when they were transplanted into the composition anthologies their lives took a different turn. E. B. White's “Once More to the Lake,” for instance, is a famous and oft anthologized essay about a father and son fishing on a lake in Maine. It is still generally read and taught as a nostalgia piece, and often used as a prompt for a what-I-did-on-my-summer-vacation theme, but when it appeared in Harper’s in 1941 and was collected the following year in One Man’s Meat, it was read as a comment on isolationism and impending war. We cannot feel the war clouds gathering in quite the same way White’s original audience did, but we can historicize White’s essay and in so doing develop a deeper understanding of both American culture and essay form. This course is about form and context.
We will begin by discussing some readings on the form of the essay, genre, the creation of the essay canon, and the rise of the American magazine culture before proceeding to examine several classic and important modern American essays and the magazines in which they were published. We will read a variety of essays by great American writers—including H. L. Mencken, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, John McPhee, Joan Didion, Mary McCarthy, and Joyce Carol Oates as well as more contemporary work, including digital, film and video essays—in order to improve our understanding of the form of the essay. We will study these essays as they originally appeared in magazines such as The New Yorker, Harper’s, Ms., and the Saturday Evening Post. Finally, we will take a look at the advent of the digital age and the new online contexts in which essays appear, sometimes as blog posts, sometimes as video essays, sometimes as Instagram essays.
Texts:
Some essays and articles will be available as handouts or on electronic reserve through the class Blackboard site.
- The Best American Essays of the Century, edited by Joyce Carol Oates and Robert Atwan (Houghton Mifflin). ISBN: 0618043705
- John D’Agata, ed., The Next American Essay (Graywolf). ISBN 9781555973759
- Carl Klaus and Ned Stuckey-French, eds. Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time (Iowa). ISBN 1609380762
Assignments:
Students will write a personal essay and a critical paper (or “essay on the essay”), make a presentation, and have an opportunity to participate in the construction of an on-going digital archive of American personal essays or pursue a project of their own design related to the essay (e.g., review essay, video essay, digitally annotate an essay, etc.). For more on the digital archive, see
Requirements: This course satisfies the requirement for coursework in the following Areas of Concentration: Post-1900 Literary and Cultural Studies (American); a Literary Genre (Non-Fiction); and History of Text Technologies (HOTT - print, production, post-1900). This course fulfills 3 credit hours of the academic requirement for the Certificate in Editing and Publishing. If a student has already met the academic requirement, the course can count for additional credits toward the 12-hour Certificate.