What, when & where
The American Essay
This call for papers invites proposals for a volume in the MLA Options for Teaching series entitled Teaching the American Essay, edited by Stephanie Redekop.
Teaching the American Essay seeks to provide undergraduate literature instructors with a range of classroom approaches, exercises, and assignments for teaching American essays as literary texts. It will complement existing volumes on using essays as compositional models in the writing classroom by collating strategies for teaching essays in American literature survey courses and special-topics seminars or in literature courses on nonfiction.
Essays today are hard to ignore: Rebecca Solnit has called ours an “essayistic age”; Christy Wampole has argued in the New York Times for the “essayification of everything”; Kara Wittman and Evan Kindley suggest that the essay is currently “experiencing something of a renaissance.” Indeed, interest in the essay genre is building among literary scholars, as illustrated by several important new volumes, including The Cambridge Companion to the Essay (2022), The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay (2022), On Essays (2020), and the forthcoming Cambridge History of the American Essay. What does it mean to read essays as literary texts, using methods of literary theory, history, or criticism? How do essays relate to or participate in broader trends in American literature, culture, and history? Alongside the wide range of dynamic approaches to these questions in literary scholarship, this volume will demonstrate ways that they can be framed and addressed in the literature classroom.
Essays have long been valuable teaching texts, with essayists like Gloria Anzaldúa, James Baldwin, Rachel Carson, Joan Didion, Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Jonathan Edwards, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Benjamin Franklin, Margaret Fuller, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Zora Neale Hurston, Barry Lopez, Audre Lorde, Claudia Rankine, Leslie Marmon Silko, Susan Sontag, Henry David Thoreau, and David Walker frequently appearing on American literature syllabi. This volume will offer strategies that help support the use of essays as literary teaching texts, while also seeking to expand and diversify what Lynn Z. Bloom has identified as the classroom “essay canon.” Suggested topics include:
Formal and Generic Approaches to the Essay
- Teaching subgenres such as the personal essay, nature essay, protest essay, travel essay, literary journalism, etc.
- Using essays to explore definitions of fact, fiction, and creative nonfiction, or the boundaries of “the literary”
- Reading “secondary sources” as literature; examining the genre of literary-critical or theoretical essays in the classroom
Teaching Essays and Essayists in Context
- Essays’ relation to historical, literary, or theoretical trends in American literature; strategies for incorporating essays into courses, units, or lessons on specific historic moments or literary movements in the United States
- Historicized or contextualized framings of specific essays or essayists
- Studies of American essays’ cultural work for specific periods or publics
Classroom Methods and Assignments
- Book history or media studies approaches to teaching essays in their print or publication contexts (e.g., in periodicals, anthologies, or online)
- Assignments that allow students to consider how studying essays as a literary genre can shape their own writing; “essays on the essay”
Deadline & how to apply
Abstract proposals (300–500 words) and a short bio or CV should be e-mailed to Stephanie Redekop (stephanie.redekop@mail.utoronto.ca) by 15 February 2023. Authors will be notified of initial acceptance by 30 April 2023. Pending peer review of the prospectus, completed essays of approximately 4,000 words will be due by 1 November 2023.
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