ENC 5217 Fall 2021 Pascoe

This course invites graduate students from all disciplines to gauge the perils and potential of academic discourse. In the first section of the class, “The Academic Essay and Its Discontents,” we will read diagnoses of the critical prose “problem” (one written by an historian, another by an art critic, and a third by an academic press editor), before going on to discuss disciplinary norms and values in prose style. The second section, “The Lessons of the Masters,” focuses on exemplary critical essays by Naomi Schor, Carolyn Steedman, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, D.A. Miller, and Vladimir Nabokov, among others. The third and final section, “Critical Avant-Gardism,” explores the elasticity of the critical essay form as practiced by Nicholson Baker, Wayne Koestenbaum, and David Markson, among others. Throughout, we’ll investigate the virtuoso sentences of critical stylists in order to figure out how they use grammar and syntax to launch charm offensives or to slay giants.

Students should come to class with a previously written essay or dissertation chapter on which they can carry out a series of exercises focusing on narrative voice, nominal versus verbal style, parallel structure, narrative suspense, compression and dilation, periodic versus cumulative style, and metaphorical language. Texts for the class consist of short pieces available on Canvas, as well as the following books: Maira Kalman’s illustrated edition of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style, Nicholson Baker’s U and I, and James Elkins’s What Happened to Art Criticism? If possible (and affordable), please purchase a used copy of Lydia Fakundiny’s out-of-print The Art of the Essay.