On the Essay
ENGL 280
Fall 2026
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01
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This course is a sustained meditation on the literary and cinematic genre of the essay. What makes an essay an essay? How do we understand the sign "essay," which holds within it the French (le essai) for "attempt" (which, by implication, can fail) and the Latin (exagium) for "weigh" and "measure" (which, by implication, reckons with imbalance) -- and how does one write a really "good" one? Is a really "good" one, given the contradictions at play, a "bad" one? What's the relationship between the essay as mode and genre and the representationally unwieldy, destructive, mysterious, and unresolvable? This course will be a sustained essay-writing experience, one thematized, partly but not only, via the metaphorical and figurative uses of cats in 20th-century Western literatures, experimental cinema, continental philosophy, and legal studies. We will consider various representations and rhetorical positions of cats, sometimes by looking at them directly (though one risks their disdain or indifference with direct engagement) in select essays and essay films by Jacques Derrida, Agnès Varda, Chris Marker, José Lezama Lima, Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, and others, and sometimes indirectly -- through juxtaposition in a bestiary of animals that seem to generate other kinds of metaphors, such as dogs, pigs, possums, and snakes. But we will start out in our readings and screenings by tracking certain tendencies that accumulate around cats or, perhaps, that they set off, such as the uncontrollable, peripatetic, esoteric, mysterious, luciferian, blackened, feminine -- that which understands and perhaps even has speech, but will not lower itself to mirror or mime the limits of "civilized language." And we will draw direct connections between some of those signs and what it means to write an essay -- to suspend the arrogance of knowing for the exacting and risky attempt at saying -- in the letter. The assigned readings and viewings for this class engage Caribbean, southern U.S., and "World" literatures, continental philosophy and specifically deconstruction, black critical theory, French "New Wave" cinema, and experimental Caribbean cinema. |
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| Credit: 1 |
Gen Ed Area Dept:
HA ENGL |
| Course Format: Seminar | Grading Mode: Student Option |
| Level: UGRD |
Prerequisites: None |
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Fulfills a Requirement for: (English)(Social, Cultural and Critical Theory Certificate) |
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Past Enrollment Probability: Not Available |
| SECTION 01 |
Major Readings: Wesleyan RJ Julia Bookstore
TBD
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Examinations and Assignments:
Reading journal, a list of answerable and unanswerable questions that emerge from the readings and screenings, and a long essay (~20 pps.)
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Additional Requirements and/or Comments:
This course contributes to the following English major requirements:
American Literature, Theory, Literary History 3, World Literature, elective. |
| Instructor(s): Ellis Neyra,Ren Times: .M..... 01:20PM-04:10PM; Location: TBA |
| Total Enrollment Limit: 19 | | SR major: 4 | JR major: 4 | | |
| Seats Available: 19 | GRAD: X | SR non-major: 3 | JR non-major: 3 | SO: 3 | FR: 2 |
| Drop/Add Enrollment Requests | | | | | |
| Total Submitted Requests: 0 | 1st Ranked: 0 | 2nd Ranked: 0 | 3rd Ranked: 0 | 4th Ranked: 0 | Unranked: 0 |
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