Module overview
This module focuses on the essay as a critical practice and a literary form. The essay is fundamental to literary criticism, and basic to assessment across your degree. But the essay is also a literary and popular-cultural genre in its own right: one that marks the invention of the individual and the compulsion to, as Virginia Woolf puts it, ‘write one’s self’.
During the course of this module, you will hone your skills as a literary essayist—a writer who produces and/or engages with literature as an art form. You will explore the eccentricities and paradoxes of essay-writing across history, through ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, from its origins in the sixteenth century to popular journalism, blogs, and multi-media essays in our own time. In so doing, you will look closely at essayists’ choices of writing style, rhetoric, evidence, argument, and aesthetics and refine these elements in your own writing.