Instructor

Lisa Haag

Class Type 

Literature

Course Description

This Prose Collection class will focus on essays contained in Best American Essays 2017. We will discuss and analyze each piece, and students will consider how their observations and insights can be applied to their own writing and a future collection. Robert Atwan, the series editor of Best American Essays described the collection this way: “’The essay is political—and politically useful, by which I mean humanizing and provocative—because of its commitment to nuance, its explorations of contingency, its spirit of unrest, its glee at overturned assumptions; because of the double helix of awe and distrust—faith and doubt—that structures its DNA,’” writes guest editor Leslie Jamison in her introduction. From the Iraqi desert to an East Jerusalem refugee camp, from the beginning of the universe to the aftermath of a suicide attempt, the genetic makeup of the eclectic and electric selections in The Best American Essays 2017 ‘thrill toward complexity.’”

Textbook