Rants, Ruminations, True Confessions: The Art of the Popular Essay

The popular essay—any essay written for a mass-media outlet, such as a newspaper, magazine, website, or radio or TV show—is undergoing a renaissance. The genre is thriving, and is being reinvented in thrilling new forms and styles by op-ed writers, cultural critics, public intellectuals, and literary journalists.

Popular essays can be political polemics, first-person narratives drawing on the writer’s life, or trenchant commentary on current events. They can incorporate journalistic reportage, use literary techniques borrowed from fiction, or employ the cultural, social, or historical analysis we associate with academic writing.

In this intensive master class with widely published essayist, noted critic, and book author Mark Dery, you’ll learn the basics of Deep Reading: the ability to take an intellectual X-ray of great essay writing, revealing what makes it great.

As well, you’ll learn detailed, hands-on techniques and approaches to the art and craft of the essay that can be applied to a variety of essay types and styles—or for that matter to expressive writing of any sort.

In RANTS, RUMINATIONS, AND TRUE CONFESSIONS, we’ll take a lightning tour of the history of the essay, from Montaigne to Roxane Gay, Joan Didion to Ta-Nehisi Coates.

Zeroing in on the popular essay today, we’ll analyze it in depth across various media, from print to the Web, and across genre lines, from the personal to the polemical.

As we go, we’ll deconstruct various essay genres, from the topical op-ed to the personal essay to the in-your-face rant to the humorous essay. By picking apart great essays and trying our hands at short writing exercises, we’ll learn the basics of how to refract larger ideas and issues through autobiographical anecdote; how to argue effectively; and how to use humor, whether sharply satirical or lightheartedly jokey.

Students will acquire an acquaintance with the masters of a wide variety of essay genres; a sense of the publishing landscape and possible outlets for their essays; and, crucially, a writer’s-eye view of the techniques and approaches that can take their essays from amateur to professional, from good to great.

About the instructor: Mark Dery is a cultural critic and journalist whose essays, feature articles, and opinion pieces have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, New York, Wired, Rolling Stone, Elle, Cabinet, Bookforum, Hyperallergic, The Daily Beast, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Washington Post, among many others. He has been a professor of journalism at NYU, a Chancellor’s Distinguished Fellow at UC Irvine, a Hertog author in Columbia University’s Hertog Fellowship program, and a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy in Rome. His latest book is the University of Minnesota essay collection I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams. He is at work on a biography of the author, illustrator, and legendary eccentric Edward Gorey for Little, Brown.