The Essay
This class focuses on the essay, since it’s flourishing nowadays as a (well, is it?) genre. We’ll start with the Frankfurt School writer Theodore Adorno and his hair-raising essay on the essay as a form that affords certain ways of thinking. We focus (albeit not exclusively) on 20th and 21st century writers at work in the United States, and will put special emphasis on women writing, and the role of art in culture. To that end, the class presumes that Joan Didion and Janet Malcolm were two of the greatest American essayists, even as Namwali Serpell, Rebecca Solnit, Susan Sontag (“Notes On Camp” is mandatory), Rachel Kushner, David Shields, Ali Smith (the chapter on “On Form” from her Artful mayhap), and Zadie Smith are 1. extremely far from shabby and 2. likely to be on the syllabus. I’d also like us to spend time with the divine Hilton Als, because who wouldn’t; and ditto Anne Carson, a classicist and poet and yes essayist, whose work defies genre. Maybe we’ll read some avant-garde manifestos. Maybe you’ll write one. “Essay” is also a verb, and means to start, to begin, or/and to try—so we’ll see what happens as we essay.
Evaluation is based on an extremely forthright midterm and final in which students will have to identify passages by author and title—that should do it for the super-ego end of things; alongside response papers and informed class participation.
NB. Image displayed on Canvas: Rebecca Horn (1944-2024), *Pencil Mask" (Bleistiftmaske). 1972. Tate Museum, London. "Strapped around the face, this mask transforms the wearer’s head into an instrument for drawing. Horn has described wearing it: ‘All pencils are about two inches long and produce the profile of my face in three dimensions...I move my body rhythmically from left to right in front of a white wall. The pencils make marks on the wall the image of which corresponds to the rhythm of my movements.’ The spike-like pencils make this one of Horn’s more threatening works. However, it is linked to the feather masks, as feather quills were also once used for writing."