policies ENGL493 Seminar in Writing & Writing Studies:
The History of the Personal Essay
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LEE TORDA 310 Tillinghast Hall Bridgewater State University 508.531.2436 [email protected] www.leetorda.com |
Fall 2016 Office Hours:
M/W 11:30-12:30 T 11:00-12:00 and by appointment. Need to make an appointment? Click here: https://goo.gl/3CqLfo |
COURSE DESCRIPTION
Too often when we think of the essay we think of the five paragraph drudgery of first year writing and MCAS, but the personal essay—probably better known these days as creative nonfiction—has a long and joyous history in literature that will be the focus of our study in this course. As a class we will consider the tradition and evolution of the personal essay from Seneca to Montaigne to Addison and Steele to Woolf and Didion and Dillard. We will also consider non-western writers like Lu Hsun and Junichiro Tanazaki, and how the tradition of writing about the personal has developed in other cultures and traditions.
Important to the study of the genre is an analysis of form and structure of the personal essay itself as well as the reading public, the audience, for the personal essay, and, for lack of a better term, the zeitgeist, the living breathing spirit of the age the writers is writing in. Students will have the opportunity to explore the genre as readers as well as writers as we develop a deep understanding of form and function of the personal essay.
The term “essay,” from the French essayer for “to try,” does not describe the academic essay, which demands a firm knowing. The personal essay, on the other hand requires a great searching on the part of the writer. This class will explore the ways the writer, reader, and context of the personal essay determine and define the search these essays embody and advance.
COURSE OBJECTIVES
After this course, students should be able to
TEXTS
The Lost Origins of the Essay & Making of the American Essay, John D’Agata (editor)
The Best American Essays of 2015, Ariel Levy (editor), Robert Atwan (series editor)
The Art of the Personal Essay, Phillip Lopate (editor)
And electronic copies of readings that will be made available off the syllabus page of this website.
NOTE: I know that three of these books are super big. I’ve tried in the syllabus to account for that and not make it so you’ve got to bring more than one of the big books in at any one time. It might happen that you need to bring two, but I’m working on keeping that down to a minimum.
REQUIREMENTS
Attendance. While I am loath to require attendance to a 400 level course—a course a student should be taking because they are far enough along in their academic career that they see the value of coming to class—experience tells me that I need to put in writing some manner of policy. Successive absences will seriously jeopardize your grade. Thus, attendance is required to every class.
Informal Writing/Reader's Notes. We will read a tremendous amount in this class. To both ensure that the reading gets done and to also give you credit for that significant work, you will write a two-page, typed and double-spaced set of Reader's Notes for most of the reading that we will do in class. These informal pieces of writing will attempt to identify the significant themes of the essays we are reading--as well as other important characteristics that shape what make the personal essay the genre that it is. By saying they are informal, I mean that the emphasis will be on your ideas and not as much the writing. Additionally, these will be living documents in our class--at least some of your classmates will most likely read them each class. Finally, these drafts will contribute to one of your more formal writing assignments--the Enhanced Reader's Notes (perhaps self-explanatory). Complete information about Reader's Notes and all other assignments is available on this website.
Best American Presentations. Part of what we are trying to understand in this course is the way that the age--the era, the time period, the location, the cultural and historical forces--that surround a writer or writers contribute to the production of the personal essay. While all literature is written out of a context, the personal essay is a genre where the mark of the time is highly visible. The collection series Best American (best American short stories, science writing, etc), offers one way to consider how a particular year produced a particular sensibility in the writing and writers of nonfiction. For this assignment, in small groups of about three, you will explore one year of the series in it's completeness and present on the class on what you figured out about the age and the writing as represented in the volume. Complete details are available on the website--and copies of previous year's Best American will be made available to you.
Formal Writing Assignments. You will have roughly four more formal writing assignments that will take up your time this semester. They are briefly described below and more explicitly outlined on other pages on this site.
Enhanced Reader's Notes. As the name would imply, this is like a bionic version of your informal Reader's Notes. Over the course of the semester, you will expand and revise three of our informal Reader's Notes into a slightly more formal piece. It will explore many of the same themes as the informal notes, but in a more polished and scholarly way. As a class we will write one set of Enhanced Notes as a class--all of us working on the same essay. And then you will be responsible for selecting two other sets of notes to revise on your own--once before midterm and once after. They will appear as finished documents in your midterm and final portfolios respectively.
The 3.5 Experiment. I love this title. It's so sci-fi. This assignment is, really, a total experiment. I am interested in how the 3.5 essay became a thing, what that does to writing and thinking and the essay, and what it means for student writers. In this assignment. We will, as a class, de-evolve an essay of ideas into, you guessed it, a 3.5 paragraph essay and then analyze what happens to the writing and the ideas. Then you will look at some of your own writing from previous classes and consider what the legacy of the 3.5 looks like there. Then, finally, you will have the chance to revise that piece of writing into a personal essay of ideas. I know, it sounds sort of crazy to me too, but I'm totally game and hope you will be too. We'll just figure it out.
Creative Nonfiction Writing. If you are going to read about the genre, you should have the chance to take your shot at writing it. This isn't a creative writing class, and I don't have expectations that all of you will want to or love to write a piece of creative nonfiction, but all I'm asking for is your effort. We'll work on this project near the end of the semester so that the lessons you are learning as a reader have a chance to sink in and take hold in you as a writer. You'll also reflect on what you learned about the genre by being asked to actually write in the genre. I bet you are thinking you are glad I'm not teaching a seminar called the Petrarchan sonnet right about now.
Critic-at-Large. The last piece of writing you'll do in this class should bring together the scholarly thinking and reading work of the semester with the genre of the personal essay. You'll have some options for writing an essay of ideas on the idea of the personal essay. You'll have the opportunity to select from writing about the genre historically or through a sub genre or about a single author. While this will, in some ways, look more like the scholarly essays you've written in other English classes and will involve similar research skills, we will work in class (and read for class) a number of scholarly essays that read like personal essays by focusing on the "Critic-at-Large" essays featured in The New Yorker magazine. I hope this essay will challenge you and delight you (and me) and serve as a true capstone experience to your English Major.
Midterm & Final Portfolios. Twice this semester you will turn in a portfolio—once at midterm and once at the end of the semester. The portfolios contain both revised and unrevised material as well as a cover letter that asks you to explore various themes of the course. The portfolios will give me the opportunity to formally assess your work this semester and assign a letter grade to it (see below for details how grading will work in our class) More information is available about this and all other assignments on our class website.
EVALUATION AND GRADING
You will not receive letter grades for individual assignments in this class. You will receive extensive written feedback on all formal writing assignments in the form of a letter. I will make samples of these letters available to you before our first workshop so you have a sense of what this feedback looks like and how it is connected to your final letter grade.
Comments on Reader’s Notes (not the Enhanced Reader’s Notes) shouldn’t be treated like evaluation but rather like an ongoing conversation between you and me: think of it as a talk between us, only in written form. If I’m not commenting it means I’m bored. Use the feedback you do get to help you select and then revise two of your Notes into Enhanced Reader’s Notes.
At midterm and at the end of the semester you will receive a “grade-so-far” and a “final grade” letter respectively. They will be come attached to your midterm and final portfolio returns. In these letters you will receive a letter grade and an overview of your performance in the class up to that point, including attention to workshop performance. I have never encountered a student who didn’t have a clear sense of how they were doing in my class based on this system of evaluation, but if you should feel that you don’t know how you are doing, come see me. We’ll figure it out.
Different requirements require different kinds and amounts of effort; therefore, different assignments have different weight in terms of evaluation. Here is a rough breakdown of how things are weighted this semester:
Ultimately, your success in this class depends on the following:
OTHER THINGS
Plagiarism. Plagiarizing, taking the ideas and/or words of others and claiming them as your own, can’t be tolerated—particularly in a 400 level class in English. Students who plagiarize work will fail the assignment without possibility to make up the work and will be at risk of failing the class.
Students with disabilities. Students who need special accommodations due to a documented disability should come to see me with written documentation of the specific disability and suggested accommodations before the end of the first week of classes. We can discuss specific accommodations at that time.
The Writing Studio. Located in the Academic Achievement Center, on the bottom floor of the Library, the Writing Studio is available to any and all students at whatever level of expertise you might be at. They are a marvelous resource for this class. You can talk to them at any stage of your writing—from brainstorming, to drafting, to editing. If you are interested in getting useful and thorough feedback, the Writing Studio is a good place to go. The work they do will reinforce everything we are doing in this class. And I think a lot of folks who work there would relish the chance to talk about your writing with you.
While this class will present you with many challenges, I believe it has its share of pleasures and rewards. What matters most to me is that you try to be the best student you are capable of being—that you try to improve as a writer and thinker. No good teacher wants to give a student a bad grade. Good standing in this class is always yours to lose.
Too often when we think of the essay we think of the five paragraph drudgery of first year writing and MCAS, but the personal essay—probably better known these days as creative nonfiction—has a long and joyous history in literature that will be the focus of our study in this course. As a class we will consider the tradition and evolution of the personal essay from Seneca to Montaigne to Addison and Steele to Woolf and Didion and Dillard. We will also consider non-western writers like Lu Hsun and Junichiro Tanazaki, and how the tradition of writing about the personal has developed in other cultures and traditions.
Important to the study of the genre is an analysis of form and structure of the personal essay itself as well as the reading public, the audience, for the personal essay, and, for lack of a better term, the zeitgeist, the living breathing spirit of the age the writers is writing in. Students will have the opportunity to explore the genre as readers as well as writers as we develop a deep understanding of form and function of the personal essay.
The term “essay,” from the French essayer for “to try,” does not describe the academic essay, which demands a firm knowing. The personal essay, on the other hand requires a great searching on the part of the writer. This class will explore the ways the writer, reader, and context of the personal essay determine and define the search these essays embody and advance.
COURSE OBJECTIVES
After this course, students should be able to
- Articulate a complex, nuanced definition of the genre that includes identifying important characteristics that help define creative nonfiction and the personal history
- Trace a history or histories of the development of the essay
- Use rigorous, advanced literary research techniques to write and present with authority about the genre, it’s history, and writers in the genre.
- Demonstrate an author’s perspective of the genre as both reader and writer
TEXTS
The Lost Origins of the Essay & Making of the American Essay, John D’Agata (editor)
The Best American Essays of 2015, Ariel Levy (editor), Robert Atwan (series editor)
The Art of the Personal Essay, Phillip Lopate (editor)
And electronic copies of readings that will be made available off the syllabus page of this website.
NOTE: I know that three of these books are super big. I’ve tried in the syllabus to account for that and not make it so you’ve got to bring more than one of the big books in at any one time. It might happen that you need to bring two, but I’m working on keeping that down to a minimum.
REQUIREMENTS
Attendance. While I am loath to require attendance to a 400 level course—a course a student should be taking because they are far enough along in their academic career that they see the value of coming to class—experience tells me that I need to put in writing some manner of policy. Successive absences will seriously jeopardize your grade. Thus, attendance is required to every class.
- If you miss more than six classes, you will fail the course.
- If you miss a group presentation day when you are presenting without me or your group knowing about it, it counts as two absences.
- If life circumstances require you to miss enough class that it will affect your grade, see me.
- Work is due the day it is due as listed on the syllabus. Absence is not an excuse for late work. If you know you will not be able to be in class on a certain day that work is due, turn the work in before, not after, the deadline.
- There is an additional expectation that you will come to class prepared to do the thinking, writing, and discussion work that a 400 level class requires. If it becomes clear to me that you are not doing the required work, I will bring it to your attention. If your participation does not improve, it will seriously and adversely affect your final grade.
- Finally, excessive late arrivals will accumulate to equal at least one absence.
Informal Writing/Reader's Notes. We will read a tremendous amount in this class. To both ensure that the reading gets done and to also give you credit for that significant work, you will write a two-page, typed and double-spaced set of Reader's Notes for most of the reading that we will do in class. These informal pieces of writing will attempt to identify the significant themes of the essays we are reading--as well as other important characteristics that shape what make the personal essay the genre that it is. By saying they are informal, I mean that the emphasis will be on your ideas and not as much the writing. Additionally, these will be living documents in our class--at least some of your classmates will most likely read them each class. Finally, these drafts will contribute to one of your more formal writing assignments--the Enhanced Reader's Notes (perhaps self-explanatory). Complete information about Reader's Notes and all other assignments is available on this website.
Best American Presentations. Part of what we are trying to understand in this course is the way that the age--the era, the time period, the location, the cultural and historical forces--that surround a writer or writers contribute to the production of the personal essay. While all literature is written out of a context, the personal essay is a genre where the mark of the time is highly visible. The collection series Best American (best American short stories, science writing, etc), offers one way to consider how a particular year produced a particular sensibility in the writing and writers of nonfiction. For this assignment, in small groups of about three, you will explore one year of the series in it's completeness and present on the class on what you figured out about the age and the writing as represented in the volume. Complete details are available on the website--and copies of previous year's Best American will be made available to you.
Formal Writing Assignments. You will have roughly four more formal writing assignments that will take up your time this semester. They are briefly described below and more explicitly outlined on other pages on this site.
Enhanced Reader's Notes. As the name would imply, this is like a bionic version of your informal Reader's Notes. Over the course of the semester, you will expand and revise three of our informal Reader's Notes into a slightly more formal piece. It will explore many of the same themes as the informal notes, but in a more polished and scholarly way. As a class we will write one set of Enhanced Notes as a class--all of us working on the same essay. And then you will be responsible for selecting two other sets of notes to revise on your own--once before midterm and once after. They will appear as finished documents in your midterm and final portfolios respectively.
The 3.5 Experiment. I love this title. It's so sci-fi. This assignment is, really, a total experiment. I am interested in how the 3.5 essay became a thing, what that does to writing and thinking and the essay, and what it means for student writers. In this assignment. We will, as a class, de-evolve an essay of ideas into, you guessed it, a 3.5 paragraph essay and then analyze what happens to the writing and the ideas. Then you will look at some of your own writing from previous classes and consider what the legacy of the 3.5 looks like there. Then, finally, you will have the chance to revise that piece of writing into a personal essay of ideas. I know, it sounds sort of crazy to me too, but I'm totally game and hope you will be too. We'll just figure it out.
Creative Nonfiction Writing. If you are going to read about the genre, you should have the chance to take your shot at writing it. This isn't a creative writing class, and I don't have expectations that all of you will want to or love to write a piece of creative nonfiction, but all I'm asking for is your effort. We'll work on this project near the end of the semester so that the lessons you are learning as a reader have a chance to sink in and take hold in you as a writer. You'll also reflect on what you learned about the genre by being asked to actually write in the genre. I bet you are thinking you are glad I'm not teaching a seminar called the Petrarchan sonnet right about now.
Critic-at-Large. The last piece of writing you'll do in this class should bring together the scholarly thinking and reading work of the semester with the genre of the personal essay. You'll have some options for writing an essay of ideas on the idea of the personal essay. You'll have the opportunity to select from writing about the genre historically or through a sub genre or about a single author. While this will, in some ways, look more like the scholarly essays you've written in other English classes and will involve similar research skills, we will work in class (and read for class) a number of scholarly essays that read like personal essays by focusing on the "Critic-at-Large" essays featured in The New Yorker magazine. I hope this essay will challenge you and delight you (and me) and serve as a true capstone experience to your English Major.
Midterm & Final Portfolios. Twice this semester you will turn in a portfolio—once at midterm and once at the end of the semester. The portfolios contain both revised and unrevised material as well as a cover letter that asks you to explore various themes of the course. The portfolios will give me the opportunity to formally assess your work this semester and assign a letter grade to it (see below for details how grading will work in our class) More information is available about this and all other assignments on our class website.
EVALUATION AND GRADING
You will not receive letter grades for individual assignments in this class. You will receive extensive written feedback on all formal writing assignments in the form of a letter. I will make samples of these letters available to you before our first workshop so you have a sense of what this feedback looks like and how it is connected to your final letter grade.
Comments on Reader’s Notes (not the Enhanced Reader’s Notes) shouldn’t be treated like evaluation but rather like an ongoing conversation between you and me: think of it as a talk between us, only in written form. If I’m not commenting it means I’m bored. Use the feedback you do get to help you select and then revise two of your Notes into Enhanced Reader’s Notes.
At midterm and at the end of the semester you will receive a “grade-so-far” and a “final grade” letter respectively. They will be come attached to your midterm and final portfolio returns. In these letters you will receive a letter grade and an overview of your performance in the class up to that point, including attention to workshop performance. I have never encountered a student who didn’t have a clear sense of how they were doing in my class based on this system of evaluation, but if you should feel that you don’t know how you are doing, come see me. We’ll figure it out.
Different requirements require different kinds and amounts of effort; therefore, different assignments have different weight in terms of evaluation. Here is a rough breakdown of how things are weighted this semester:
- Reader’s Notes 15%
- Enhanced Reader’s Notes 15% (3 papers, 5% each)
- 3.5 Experiment 15%
- Creative Nonfiction Writing 10%
- Best American Presentation 15%
- Critic-at-Large 15%
- Midterm &Final Portfolio (Reflections and Revision work) 15% (7.5% each)
Ultimately, your success in this class depends on the following:
- Fulfilling all of the requirements listed above,
- The quality of your written and oral work,
- Your efforts to try new things and think in new ways.
OTHER THINGS
Plagiarism. Plagiarizing, taking the ideas and/or words of others and claiming them as your own, can’t be tolerated—particularly in a 400 level class in English. Students who plagiarize work will fail the assignment without possibility to make up the work and will be at risk of failing the class.
Students with disabilities. Students who need special accommodations due to a documented disability should come to see me with written documentation of the specific disability and suggested accommodations before the end of the first week of classes. We can discuss specific accommodations at that time.
The Writing Studio. Located in the Academic Achievement Center, on the bottom floor of the Library, the Writing Studio is available to any and all students at whatever level of expertise you might be at. They are a marvelous resource for this class. You can talk to them at any stage of your writing—from brainstorming, to drafting, to editing. If you are interested in getting useful and thorough feedback, the Writing Studio is a good place to go. The work they do will reinforce everything we are doing in this class. And I think a lot of folks who work there would relish the chance to talk about your writing with you.
While this class will present you with many challenges, I believe it has its share of pleasures and rewards. What matters most to me is that you try to be the best student you are capable of being—that you try to improve as a writer and thinker. No good teacher wants to give a student a bad grade. Good standing in this class is always yours to lose.