# English 185e. The Essay: History and Practice Instructor: [James Wood](/people/james-wood) Spring 2026: Tuesday & Thursday, 12:00-1:15pm | Location: TBD Matthew Arnold famously said that poetry is, at bottom, “a criticism of life.” But if any literary form is truly a criticism of life, it is the essay. And yet despite the fact that all students write essays, most students rarely study them; bookshops and libraries categorize such work only negatively, by what it is not: “non-fiction.” At the same time, the essay is at present one of the most productive and fertile of literary forms. It is practiced as memoir, reportage, diary, criticism, and sometimes all four at once. Novels are becoming more essayistic, while essays are borrowing conventions and prestige from fiction. This class will disinter the essay from its comparative academic neglect, and examine the vibrant contemporary borderland between the reported and the invented. We will study the history of the essay, from Montaigne to the present day. Rather than study that history purely chronologically, each class will group several essays from different decades and centuries around common themes: death, detail, sentiment, race, gender, photography, the city, witness, and so on. In addition to writing about essays – writing critical essays about essays – students will also be encouraged to write their own creative essays: we will study the history of the form, and practice the form itself. Essayists likely to be studied: Plutarch, Montaigne, Hazlitt, De Quincey, Woolf, Benjamin, Orwell, Camus, Primo Levi, Barthes, Baldwin, Sontag, Dyer, Didion, Leslie Jamison, Knausgaard, Ta-Nehisi Coates. This course satisfies the “1900-2000 Guided Elective" requirement for English concentrators and Secondary Field students. See also:- [ 2023-24 ](/academic-year/2023-24) - [ 2024-25 ](/academic-year/2024-25) - [ 2025-26 ](/academic-year/2025-26) - [ Lecture Courses ](/course-type/5-lectures-sections) - [ Guided Elective: 1900-Present ](/meets-requirements/guided-elective-1900-2000) - [ Course ](/page-type/course) - [ Spring 2026 ](/term/spring-2026) - [ Spring 2025 ](/term/spring) - [ Spring 2024 ](/term/spring-2023)