This seminar is earmarked for all MSc specialisations
Description
One of the most popular and important forms of political communication today is the essay – the kind of long-form prose one finds in publications like The New Yorker, the Atlantic, or the London Review of Books, to name a few prominent examples. Essays often draw widely from political science scholarship (and indeed are frequently written by scholars), but they are not themselves instances of academic prose. Instead, they seek to distill political ideas and communicate them to a wider audience. In this class we study the political essay as a way of communicating ideas. Where did the essay come from? What are its principal attributes? How did it come to adopt its present form? The class begins with classics of the genre – Michel de Montaigne, Joseph Roth, George Orwell – and continues with some of the most prolific writers of the 20th and 21st centuries (James Baldwin, Susan Sontag and Jenny Erpenbeck). In addition to reading essays and analyzing them, the class will workshop student writing.
Course Objectives
This course has three objectives: first, it will teach students how to read and analyze political essays (from different time periods, countries, and across a host of publications); second, it will teach students how to write essays (including through in-class workshops); third, it will teach students to think about how ideas from the political science canon can be communicated to readers outside of the academe.
Mode of instruction
Seminar
Course Load
28 hours of classes (attendance is mandatory)
140 hours of reading and class preparation (20 hours per week over 7 weeks)
112 hours to complete the final essay
Total: 280 hours
Assessment method
Participation & Workshop Presentation (30%)
Final essay (70%)
The final essay will only be graded if the student has attended the seminars
The final mark for the course is established by determining the weighted average.
Reading list
The reading list and the course syllabus will be posted on Brightspace before the start of the course.
Registration
See 'Practical Information'
Timetable
See 'MyTimetable'