This course is part of the Summer Technology Sabbatical pilot program. More information about Technology Sabbatical classes can be found here.
“The Contemporary Essay” acquaints students with the genre’s origins, formal considerations, conventions, experiments, and expressive potential. The essay’s elasticity, inclusiveness, and breadth allow fiction’s narrative arc to mingle with poetry’s associative reasoning. We’ll read a variety of living authors, focusing on aspects of narrative and discursive balance, locus of meaning, and conceptions of nonfiction and fact. In written work, students will explore the relationship between writer, subject matter, and reader; credibility and authority to speak; and the nature of claims based on evidence and first-hand personal experience. The course readings generally begin with more topically oriented writing driven by research, moving through the semester toward more abstract, personal, or formally inventive lyric essays.
The in-class policy forbids the use of laptops and phones as a part of this tech sabbatical and as a way to foster improved class discussions. In addition to the in-class screen-free time, students will commit to twice that number of hours—85.5, approximately, for a summer term that includes 42.75 contact hours—away from technology during the course. The assignments for these daily hours will include analog reading, active notation, writing in place, and preparing fully for in-class discussion.