Camille Corot’s “Interrupted Reading” (1870)
Start here, with this updated essay from the Medium account for this course:
That is the first part of your assignment: to use that instructional essay to help you analyze the central text below. Any discussion of how we are redefining the act and art of writing essays has to start there, with a meta-discussion of analysis and critical thinking.
Paul Graham, “The Age of the Essay”
I encourage you to practice interrupted reading with this text. The copy provided to you in class numbers the paragraphs, which goes along with the subheadings the author uses to encourage interrupted reading:
Interrupted reading is what it sounds like: You read a bit, pause, and then analyze what you’ve read. You don’t want to destroy the act of reading, though, which is why you’ve started this assignment by looking at analysis and over-analysis. You need a balance.
To encourage you to get started, here is an excerpt from the beginning of Graham’s essay on essays:
The most obvious difference between real essays and the things one has to write in school is that real essays are not exclusively about English literature. Certainly schools should teach students how to write. But due to a series of historical accidents the teaching of writing has gotten mixed together with the study of literature. And so all over the country students are writing not about how a baseball team with a small budget might compete with the Yankees, or the role of color in fashion, or what constitutes a good dessert, but about symbolism in Dickens.
With the result that writing is made to seem boring and pointless. Who cares about symbolism in Dickens? Dickens himself would be more interested in an essay about color or baseball.
How did things get this way? To answer that we have to go back almost a thousand years…
The complete essay gives you the rest of the history, and then it gives us the philosophy and practicality we’ll need to spend the rest of the school year developing your ability and desire to write.
Remember to use our reformatted copy for in-class and interstitial annotations, questions, etc., and to use the comment section here to talk to me and to each other.