Scribner Seminar Program
Course Description
Writing America: The Contemporary Essay
Instructor(s): Linda Hall, English
What can a writer tell us about America that a scholar cannot? Students of history
often turn to novels such as The Great Gatsby or Sister Carrie for a more nuanced
description of the American experience than is available in many textbooks. But this
country has also been defined and redefined by its literary nonfiction writers—men
and women who produce not political documents or opinion journalism but beautifully
crafted essays that, as Joseph Wood Krutch once claimed, “get closer to some all-important
realities than any number of studies could.” In this seminar we will examine the realities
of art, education, race, class and gender in America by studying what James Baldwin,
E.B. White, Joan Didion, and Zora Neale Hurston (among many others) have had to say
about them. We will also use the work of the most celebrated essayists of the past
century to inform and inspire our own writing on America.
Course Offered