Beyond Argument offers an in-depth examination of how current ways of thinking about the writer-page relation in personal essays can be reconceived according to practices in the care of the self — an ethic by which writers such as Seneca, Montaigne, and Nietzsche lived. This approach promises to reinvigorate the form and address many of the concerns expressed by essay scholars and writers regarding the lack of rigorous exploration we see in our students' personal essays — and sometimes, even, in our own. In pursuing this approach, Sarah Allen presents a version of subjectivity that enables productive debate in the essay, among essays, and beyond.

This course studies several important examples of the genre that between the early 18th century and the end of the 20th has come to seem the definitive literary form for representing and coming to terms with modernity. Syllabi vary, but the class usually attempts to convey a sense of the form’s development over the past few centuries. Among topics likely to be considered are: developments in narrative technique, the novel’s relation to history, national versus linguistic definitions of an “English” novel, social criticism in the novel, realism versus “romance,” the novel’s construction of subjectivities. Writers studied have included Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Samuel Richardson, Lawrence Sterne, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Emily and Charlotte Brontë, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Salman Rushdie.

Fiction, as you probably know by now, is the type of writing that an author creates, including imaginary characters and conflicts. In other words, it’s fake. Nonfiction, the type of writing you will focus on here, is factual, and addresses the real world and real things that are happening in it. More and more, however, nonfiction can be challenging to analyze as writers can slide their opinions into their writing. This becomes a challenge for the readers: What is the truth and what is merely an opinion? In this seminar, you will learn about objectivity and subjectivity, and why it’s necessary to be able to make inferences based on a writer’s claim in nonfiction reading. Don’t worry if some of those terms don’t make sense yet; you will learn about them soon enough.StandardsCC.1.2.9-10.B: Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the text says explicitly as well as inferences and conclusions based on an author’s explicit assumptions and beliefs about a subject.CC.1.2.9-10.C: Apply appropriate strategies to analyze, interpret, and evaluate how an author unfolds an analysis or series of ideas or events, including the order in which the points are made, how they are introduced and developed, and the connections that are drawn between them.CC.1.2.9-10.I: Analyze seminal U.S. documents of historical and literary significance, including how they address related themes and concepts.