Replay: Phillip Lopate shares Five Things He's Learned about Reading and Writing the Essay
Check out the first five minutes of his recent class.
“The essay is a literary form dating back to ancient times, with a long and glorious history. As the record par excellence of a mind tracking its thoughts, it can be considered the intellectual bellwether of any modern society. The great promise of essays is the freedom they offer to explore, digress, acknowledge uncertainty; to evade dogmatism and embrace ambivalence and contradiction; to engage in intimate conversation with one’s readers and literary forbears; and to uncover some unexpected truth, preferably via a sparkling prose style.”
– Phillip Lopate, Five Things I've Learned about Reading and Writing the Essay
Philllip Lopate is a legendary, central figure in the revival of the American essay, both through his ubiquitous edited anthology, Art of the Personal Essay, and his own essay collections, Bachelorhood, Against Joie de Vivre, Portrait of My Body and Portrait Inside My Head. Here’s the first five minutes of Phillip’s recent two-hour class in which he shares the Five Things He’s Learned about the powerful legacy and continuing pleasure of this engaging, versatile art form.
Five Things I’ve Learned about Reading and Writing the Essay offers a place for readers and writers alike to familiarize themselves with the essay and to become a dedicated reader of its form. In his class, Phillip discusses various masters of the essay and advocates useful practices for those who wish to try their hand at it
Want to learn about the essay from one of the genre’s greatest masters? This class is for you.
Phillip is also the author of such book-length nonfiction works as Being with Children Waterfront, Notes on Sontag, Rudy Burckhardt: Photographer and A Mother’s Tale. Additionally, he has written books of fiction (Confessions of Summer, The Rug Merchant, Two Marriages) and poetry (At the End of the Day). He has edited other anthologies (Writing New York and American Movie Critics), and is currently completing a three-volume historical anthology of the American essay. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a winner of Guggenheim, New York Public Library and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, he is on the faculty of Columbia University’s Graduate Writing Program, School of the Arts.
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