ENG 4825
The Essay
Traynor Hansen
MWF 2:30–3:50 p.m.
"How to get along with people, how to deal with violence, how to adjust to losing someone you love...in other words, how to LIVE?"
Blogs, links, tweets, pages, postings ... today's world is filled with short prose writings of many kinds, many of which ask these very same fundamentally human questions -- but NOT many of which might be thought of today as "essays" (English course assignment might come to mind first...).
But did you know that, in fact, this literary inheritance of insights and intimacy in short prose form can be traced to the innovation of one single man? -- Michel de Montaigne in Renaissance France. Montaigne called this new writing he invented "essay" because it comes from from the French verb essayer which means "to try or attempt or test." So, for Montaigne, to "try out" a new idea, to "give it a whirl," as one writer puts it, is to write "an essay"
And write them he did!
Montaigne is responsible for literally hundreds of fascinating, witty, and insightful "tests" on what it means to be human in all its passions and contradictions. In this course, then, we will read many of Montaigne's essays as our guiding framework to trace out the history and development of this fascinating genre and investigate its aspects at close hand. We will discover the innovations that shaped the essay's development in the centuries that followed Montaigne and continue reading through the great essayists who followed in his footsteps -- from Samuel Johnson to William Hazlitt to Virginia Woolf -- and up to its vital importance for the conversations of our time.
Texts:
Sarah Bakewell, How To Live, Or, A Life of Montaigne In One Question and
Twenty Attempts At An Answer
Michel de Montaigne, The Collected Essays
Philip Lopate, ed., The Art of the Personal Essay