The Personal Essay

The Personal Essay is a Humanities, Arts and Cultural Studies class taught by Marian MacCurdy.

Course Description
The rigors of academia mandate that we write in one form or another for most of the first 21 years of our lives. After that we write to get jobs and to keep them, we write to engage in the commerce of our culture, and we write to communicate with others and with ourselves. This last genre is probably the least practiced but among the most important since writing is a process that helps us to make meaning. As such writing is both a verb as well as a noun; it both represents our best thinking and helps us arrive at it. We will investigate literary elements such as character and setting and experiment with verb tenses and stylistic elements. We will study rhetorical choices as they play out in various literary situations, all with the goal of engaging constructively in the writing process and producing personal essays that best reflect our emotional, intellectual and literary realities. This course is called The Personal Essay because the topic you will be writing on most often is yourself. However, the irony of the term is in unearthing our own values, and assumptions about the world and the experiences that helped to generate them, we begin a journey that ultimately takes us beyond ourselves and out to a community which can establish our common humanity.

Previous Semesters Offered

 * Fall 2009