Writing the Self: The Art of the Personal Essay
The hallmark of the personal essay is its intimacy and emphasis on individual and personal experience, which provides many opportunities for examining the ways in which writing portrays a unique voice. In fact, many have understood voice as the most distinctive characteristic of the personal essay. What is voice, though? Where does it come from? Why or how does a distinctive voice make an essay successful? In this section of Writing 20, we will consider these questions and trace the evolution of the personal essay genre by reading and responding to a variety of nonfiction essays and critical/theoretical reactions to personal writing. We will interrogate how writers effectively establish or represent voice within writing while also asking how your identity, in its own unique configuration, informs and affects the decisions you make as writers. Furthermore, we will discuss the challenges of reading and writing personal essays given their potential for controversial subject matter. You will be assigned six one-page response papers, which are designed to stimulate class discussion and prepare you for three major writing assignments. You will write two personal essays, which will give you the opportunity to write about your own significant life experiences and experiment with the limits of the wide genre. The final project will be a researched essay, in which you will examine and respond to critical or theoretical readings about some aspect of the genre (writing, reading, or teaching personal essays) and reflect on your own experiences with personal writing in the course. This assignment offers the opportunity to further respond to the critical texts you have had a chance to read. Reading and writing in this genre will call on you to draw on skills that most academic writing requires: suspending judgment, tolerating ambiguity, and using questions to challenge easy assumptions. Most importantly, your assignments will call on you to convey what you think while we consider the definitions, limits, and challenges of the personal essay genre. Readings my include nonfiction essays by David Sedaris, Joan Didion, Nancy Mairs, Virginia Woolf and others.
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