Courses

With the longstanding focus on poetry, novels, and drama in academic literary curricula, the essay form has suffered a relative neglect as a focus of study and research.  This seminar will seek to redeem this lack by a semester-long exploration of the genre in the broad fields of politics and morals as viewed from both literary and philosophical angles in a wide range of essays of the modern period.   The goal (or perhaps, better, a goal) will be to see how well the essay does what is most often done --in this wide thematic swathe-- by learned treatises on the one hand and poems, novels, and plays on the others.