112th: Crafting Presence with Nicole Wallack

Event date: 
11/29/2018 - 7:00pm

Crafting PresenceJoin us at Book Culture on Thursday, November 29th at 7pm for a discussion of Nicole Wallack's Crafting Presence: The American Essay and the Future of Writing Studies.

Essays are central to students’ and teachers’ development as thinkers in their fields. In Crafting Presence, Nicole B. Wallack develops an approach to teaching writing with the literary essay that holds promise for writing students, as well as for achieving a sense of common purpose currently lacking among professionals in composition, creative writing, and literature.

Wallack analyzes examples drawn primarily from volumes of The Best American Essays to illuminate the most important quality of the essay as a literary form: the writer’s “presence.” She demonstrates how accounting for presence provides a flexible and rigorous heuristic for reading the contexts, formal elements, and purposes of essays. Such readings can help students learn writing principles, practices, and skills for crafting myriad presences rather than a single voice.

Crafting Presence holds serious implications for writing pedagogy by providing new methods to help teachers and students become more insightful and confident readers and writers of essays. At a time when liberal arts education faces significant challenges, this important contribution to literary studies, composition, and creative writing shows how an essay-centered curriculum empowers students to show up in the world as public thinkers who must shape the “knowledge economy” of the twenty-first century.

 


Nicole B. Wallack is senior lecturer in discipline in the Department of English and Comparative Literature and director of the Undergraduate Writing Program at Columbia University. As a senior associate of the Institute for Writing and Thinking at Bard College, she leads writing-­across-the-curriculum workshops for high schools and colleges around the country.

Event address: 
Book Culture
536 W 112th St
New York, NY 10025
Crafting Presence: The American Essay and the Future of Writing Studies By Nicole B. Wallack Cover Image
$29.95
ISBN: 9781607325345
Availability: On hand at one or more locations, see product page for details
Published: Utah State University Press - June 1st, 2017