Here are the essays we’ll be discussing this week on the blog and in our Thursday Zoom call. I’m assigning two pairs of essays, which each operate in some kind of relation to each other. If your time is limited this week, I suggest that you read one pair.
pair 1: interdependence and independence
Briallen Hopper, “Lean On”
This seems timely to me—it’s an essay that considers the value of human interdependence, using literary readings along the way to consider where our ideas about what we should need from and depend on each other for come from.
And here’s an exciting piece of news to go with it: Dr. Hopper, who teaches creative nonfiction writing at Queens College (and has previously taught at Yale after earning her PhD from Princeton) will join us for our Thursday Zoom call—if we get lucky, she maaaaay even be stopping by this post to respond to your thoughts, so feel free to ask questions in the comments that would benefit from her input.
Joan Didion, “On Self-Respect”
Joan Didion is one of America’s great essayists. This little piece from 1961 was originally published in Vogue magazine (there used to be literature in fashion magazines…just as there used to be serious fiction and interviews in Playboy! Times have changed), and it reminds me of “Invictus,” which I read you on our call last week. It might still feel timely to us and to contemporary debates about the idea of “character,” its contents, its contexts, and its absences.
pair 2: education, personal and political
Mary McCarthy, “Getting an Education—I”
Mary McCarthy was a critic and a novelist, and she also wrote a memoir about her Catholic girlhood. This essay reflects on the role of education in her early life—what it meant to her, how it related and diverged from school—in the first person, which might be an interesting chance to consider how we reflect on and value our own education(s). She thinks about education with political resonance, but primarily as a personal experience, which is a little different than the alignment of elements in the next essay…
Vinson Cunningham, “Prep For Prep and the Faultlines in New York’s Schools”
This essay might make you feel angry, and it might make you feel sad. It makes me feel both of those ways. It’s also a different kind of essay than the others we’re reading for the week: it leans more heavily on reporting, on the kind of argumentative structure and evidence that might feel familiar to us from people trying to teach us how to write essays for school. As you read it, try to pay attention to the ways that it fits into and departs from that model.
ENG 222: Literary Genres 