English 398 - The Lyric Essay

This creative writing course explores alternatives to the traditional essay. If we shake up that rhetorical structure, what new forms of knowing can be experienced and expressed? Operating at the juncture of non-fiction and poetry, the lyric essay questions the relationship between objective and subjective material, troubling narrative, discursive logic and established modes of persuasion. It experiments with other organizational principles—including association, music, digression, disorder, fragmentation and silence—as it seeks to build new structures that embody the process of learning, wondering and being. 

Students will read a wide range of lyric essays alongside critical texts that debate the nature and purpose of the form. Students also will create and workshop their own lyric essays, experimenting with a variety of practices, including Zuihitsu, the prose poem, the hermit crab essay, collage work, and the braided essay. 

Readings may include work by Kimiko Hahn, Claudia Rankine, Eula Bliss, John D’Agata, Jenny Boully, Lia Purpura, Anne Carson, Roxanne Gay, Maggie Nelson, Lee Horikoshi Roripaugh and others.

Limited to 15 students. Fall semester. Lecturer Kapur.

How to handle overenrollment: enrollment will be by permission of the instructor with priority given to students who have taken at least one CW course and/or who plan to write a thesis.

Students who enroll in this course will likely encounter and be expected to engage in the following intellectual skills, modes of learning, and assessment: Creative writing, workshops, literary analysis, close reading, independent research, group work, archival research, oral presentations.