The Art of the Personal Essay

One of the best contemporary essayists, Phillip Lopate, describes the personal essay as a genre that involves both story-telling and analysis in an unflinching investigation of outside and inside, world and self. Requiring a conversational, conspiratorial, and often comedic style, the personal essay challenges popular opinion, treading on dearly held values and beliefs. That essays can exercise this sort of discursive violence without alienating readers is due, in large part, to the insight they produce, to the artfulness of the writing, and to the unique pleasures of shock and surprise that they offer their reader. But the reader’s willingness to be challenged in this way might also be explained by the fact the the essayist’s own cherished beliefs are not spared. Essayists must be willing to relinquish their defenses for what Lopate calls “the spectacle of baring the naked soul.” In an effort to achieve unusual honesty, personal essayists break the rules of most forms of persuasive writing, digressing, meandering, pointing out self-contradictions, all in the service of a double (and apparently contradictory) movement: deepening and expanding the inquiry, trying to get to the stuff that counts. In this course we will have two goals: reading and analyzing some of the best essayists from various national traditions in terms of both content and craft, and writing and workshopping our own.