Vijay Seshadri

In this omnibus nonfiction writing class, we will encounter and examine over the course of a year a range of literary, artistic, social, and historical phenomena—from plays by Shakespeare and poems by Whitman, to selections from autobiographies of Gandhi and Malcolm X and Virginia Woolf, to films and memoirs of identity and gender liberation, to a classic documentary about the terminal ward of a great Northeastern-seaboard hospital, to an oral history of a poor neighborhood in Mexico City, to artwork in New York museums and current art exhibits in Chelsea, to sports events and contemporaneous political conflicts, to masterworks of modernist nonfiction experimentation. In response to this range and overflowing variety of material, students will be asked to write accurately and cogently, in the tradition of various nonfiction genres, designed to capture one aspect or another of these encounters with reality. We will write impersonal work—reportage, reviews, journalistic profiles, editorials; and we will write highly personal pieces involving the life experiences of each of us in relation to what we encounter—personal essays, memoir fragments, hybrid pieces that experiment with form, that create their own genre, that allow us to fully explore our subjectivity and our unique points of view. We will work out the rhetorical and investigative techniques, whereby the truth of experience is represented on the page. We will also look at the many ways in which language can be used to distort, obscure, and evade the truth. We will think practically and will think philosophically about representing reality. We will develop our voices and our control of words, sentences, paragraphs, and larger units. Our biases will tend toward clarity of thought and beauty of expression. In this course, there will be weekly conferences for the first six weeks and biweekly conferences thereafter.

Nonfiction writing is defined not by what it is but by what it is not. It is not fiction. But what it is not comprehends a vast territory. We will spend the semester looking at the more unusual, experimental, and lyrical inhabitants of this territory: personal essays masquerading as anthropological studies or paleontological meditations or political screeds, blog posts from medieval Japan and Renaissance France, diaries, poems in the form of diary entries, essays masquerading as poems, micro nonfictions, feuilletons, prose poems passing themselves off as travelogues, koans, sermons, speeches, and prayers. We will read a variety of writers from the past (among—but not limited to—Sei Shonagon, Montaigne, Sir Thomas Browne, Wilde, Pessoa, Gandhi, Mandelstam, Elizabeth Bishop, V. S. Naipaul, the unknown genius who wrote the Book of Job), and from the present (John D’Agata, Bhanu Kapil, Anne Carson, Jonathan Franzen). After the first few weeks, we will alternate, week-by-week, sessions discussing reading with sessions discussing student work. Conference work will comprise discussion of reading tailored to individual students and the equivalent of two large pieces of writing in whatever form student and instructor agree upon.

This combination literary survey and writing course will introduce students to the rhetoric and reality of factual writing and to the dilemmas of truth that obtain when we take complex, fragmentary human experience—whether personal or social—and transform that experience into stories. Students will be asked to write their own stories and to research stories about the world along the spectrum of nonfiction from journalism to essays to oral histories to case studies. They will also be asked to think about the underlying epistemic problems that come with representing facts in language—from blunt-force manipulations of truth for the sake of political gain to more subtle distortions that arise from the techniques of creation, representation, and persuasion. We will read a broad variety of writers, ranging from Aristotle, Longinus, and St. Augustine to Basho, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin, and Marshall McLuhan to a legion of contemporary writers writing about race, gender, sex, art, technology, the environment, sports, and themselves. We will think long and fruitfully about how the ephemeral facticity of the world is fashioned into, on the one hand, propaganda and polemic and, on the other, great art.

The essay has been used as a vehicle of intimacy and directness not only by writers of all genres but also by artists of other art forms and by intellectual workers in a wide variety of fields. Why is this? Maybe because the essay is flexible enough to adapt to the shape, structure, and movement of our minds as they actually function. We will examine the essay by reading 15 to 20 significant examples of the genre, ranging from contemporary writers (Maggie Nelson, David Foster Wallace, Nancy Mairs, Claudia Rankine, among others) to writers from recent history (Sontag, Didion, Mailer, Eiseley, Baldwin, Orwell, Tanizaki), to its classic writers (Yeats, Pater, Hazlitt), to its creator (Montaigne), and then to its prehistory in the sermon, the meditation, the epistle, the spiritual autobiography (Edwards, Basho, Augustine, St. Paul, Plato). Conference work will comprise two essays, both to be presented to the whole class, and a series of exercises.

This class will examine and produce a range of work from the journalistic to the critical, from the practical to the mystical, in the vast landscape of arts writing. We will write liner notes, catalogue copy for gallery shows, short reviews, long reviews, critical essays, and deep and subjective interior meditations on our experience of artists and their work. We will read broadly across time—possibly including, but not limited to, Samuel Johnson on Richard Savage, Wordsworth and Coleridge on themselves, Nietzsche on Wagner, Adorno (via Thomas Mann) on Opus 111, V. S. Naipaul on Flaubert, Amiri Baraka on Billie Holiday, Virginia Woolf on Thomas Hardy, Thomas De Quincey on Shakespeare, James Baldwin on Richard Wright, Glenn Gould on Barbra Streisand, Mark Strand on Edward Hopper, Jean-Luc Godard on Nicholas Ray, Pauline Kael on Sam Peckinpah. Students should feel confident in their familiarity with one or two art forms, broadly understood, and should expect, along with the reading, to write several small and two larger (7-12 pages) pieces. Conference work will comprise research projects on those artists or works of art, or both, that class members, in consultation with the instructor, decide are their special province.