Course description

This course will take students through a range of carefully selected key works in the nonfiction prose tradition in the English language. As they study these texts, students will consider what it means to construct an "I" in these texts, an "I" who is simultaneously subject, object, and narrator of the text. Students will discover how genre, period, and audience all affect the construction of the self in these texts in ways that draw upon previous literary traditions and that shape the narratives that come after them. Thus, students taking this course will gain an appreciation of how prose nonfiction narratives participate in literary history, as well as a sense of the theory and practice of prose nonfiction and its increasingly complex intersections with fictional genres. More fundamentally, students will come to consider their own position as creators of an "I" as they develop analyses of the texts they study.

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