Title: TOPICS IN RHETORIC

PRQ: Consent of department.

The essay is the most popular of all literary genres; literally millions are written every day.  Criticism, personal reflection, argument, and scientific discovery are communicated in essays, and the essay is the form which thousands of undergraduates are taught in English composition classes, yet almost no attention has been paid in the English curriculum to the essay as a rhetorical or literary form.

This class will study how the essay began life as an anti-rhetorical genre, and then gradually absorbed and transmuted the conventions of classical rhetoric into a format, first, for expressing personal and interior states of which the rhetorical tradition had no conception, and second, for expressing scientific and critical arguments which seemed to transcend the public sphere in which the rhetorical tradition dwelt. Along the way, the essay became the premier genre for arguing from common sense, even while science was adapting it to the most specialized of fields. The course will try to draw some conclusions about the formal, rhetorical, and psychological qualities of the essay.

:  Students will write two short papers and one longer paper, and deliver one oral report.  There will be a final exam.

Bacon, Francis,  The Essays

The Spectator: Selections

Hazlitt, William, Selected Essays

Lamb, Charles, Essays

Johnson, Samuel, Selected Writings

Montaigne, Michel,  Essays: A Selection.

Fakundiny, Lydia, ed., The Art of the Essay

Woolf, Virginia, The Common Reader