Nonfiction Workshop: The World and You

Catalog description

This course will be divided into three units, each of which will involve reading published essays and writing our own. The first unit, Demons, will focus on writers’ personal challenges, from mental illness (as in Susanna Kaysen’s memoir, Girl, Interrupted) to migraines (the subject of Joan Didion’s essay, “In Bed”). The second unit focuses on braided essays; students will read essays whose authors juxtapose seemingly disparate topics in forming coherent works. Melissa Febos’ essay, “All of Me,” for example, reveals how writing, singing, tattoos, and heroin addiction all relate to the need to deal with pain. For the final unit, Critical Survey, we will read and write critical takes on works or figures in particular fields; for example, B. R. Myers’ A Reader’s Manifesto, his take on the novelists of the day, and James Baldwin’s The Devil Finds Work, about the movies of his youth. THE CURRICULUM 196 A Question of Character: The Art of the Profile