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PART 1. Reading Assignment: Find and Read 1 General Audience Essay

Under 11/27 on our syllabus, a note reads "Finding your own 'General Audience' Literary Essay (resources tba)." Well, here are those resources! Explore the following links and locate a suitable general audience essay  that reflects on the contemporary relevance of a literary work. In other words, please do not simply choose any essay, and please do not choose a book review of a recent book; rather, look around and search for an essay in which the author uses insights gained from a literary work in order to think through a pressing issue in our own time -- just as each of the assigned essays does.

· Public Books - The Book That Made Me   （1）

· Avidly (2)

· Avidly - Essays on Louisa May Alcott's  Little Women (any of these will do!) (3)

· Essays by Merve Emre (4)

· LARB (Los Angeles Review of Books) - Essays   (5)

· LitHub - Longform (6)

· If you already know of another general audience essay  that reflects on the contemporary relevance of a literary work, then you are free to use that one. You may wish to email me first, just to verify that it's suitable.

(1)

https://www.publicbooks.org/category/features/the-book-that-made-me/

(2)

http://avidly.lareviewofbooks.org/

(3)

http://avidly.lareviewofbooks.org/category/littlewomen/

(4)

https://www.merveemre.com/essays-1/

(5)

https://lareviewofbooks.org/essays/

(6)

https://lithub.com/category/longform/

PART 2. Reading Post.

Once you have located and read a general audience essay, answer these questions in a reading post: (1) Explain what this essay is about (basically, summarize it for us) and which literary work (or works) the author discusses; (2) Reflect on the status of the literary work(s) within this particular essay. In other words, is the literary work simply a prompt or jumping off point for exploring a larger issue (as in Nazarian's "What We've Lost with Male Friendships")? Is the literary work a more central feature that the author analyzes extensively (as Socarides does with Emily Dickinson's poem)? Or does the literary work relate in some other way to the author's main set of concerns in this essay? And  what do you think of this author's use of literature: is it compelling, convincing, or effective -- and why or why not?