IMF 52319 Nonfiction: Contemporary Personal Essay Collections L

Instructor

Kali VanBaale

Class Type

Literature

Course Description

This course will examine the literary form of the personal narrative essay collection by examining three vastly different collections—Bad Feminist, Collected Schizophrenias: Essays, and Me Talk Pretty One Day. We’ll discuss each individual essay or section in the collections, and then the body of the collections themselves—what unifies the collections beyond the author, how the collections were put together in their essay order or unique/unconventional structure, and what larger story the collections tell as a whole. And finally, we’ll get into the finer details of constructing personal essay collections from the number of essays to include, to titles, to choosing essays for your own collection.