What do I know?
Subtitle: reading, writing, and teaching the essay
By: edited by Janis Forman.
Contributors: Forman, Janis.
Publisher: Boynton/Cook; Heinemann
Published: 1996
Place of publication: Portsmouth, NH
Language: eng
Number of pages: 143
Subjects: Essay.
Description: The essay has had a secure but circumscribed place in college education, mostly limited to freshman composition. What Do I Know? responds to the imbalance between the presence of essays in freshman composition and the relative absence of reflection about the genre, arguing for the inclusion of the essay in the academy as a genre to be read and written. Indeed, without this inclusion, a whole education about language may be jeopardized.

What Do I Know? contributes to a fairly new conversation about the essay and its place within and beyond the academy, a conversation led by humanities and composition scholars who are actively engaged in their own writing and in the teaching of writing.

What Do I Know? takes the essay out of its narrow niche in the academy as a "service" genre and into a larger space. At its best, working with essays can inspire readers, writers, and teachers to go beyond the traditional categories of knowledge and discourse sanctioned by the academy and to compose "specimens of the art of wondering."
Notes: Includes bibliographical references.
Table of contents: title: (Re)placing the essay / Donald McQuade; title: The essay : is it literature? / Robert Atwan; title: Excursion of the mind : toward a poetics of uncertainty in the disjunctive essay / Carl H. Klaus; title: Text and context : the essay and the politics of disjunctive essay / Rebecca Blevins Faery; title: Essaying against the grain / Pat C. Hoy II; title: From stories to essays / Richard Marius; title: Essay and story, essay as story / Lowry Pei; title: Shooting an essay, teaching an elephant : fact and fiction in Orwell and Woolf / Gordon Harvey; title: Fictitious facts and the question of genre / Robert DiYanni; title: Didion, Berryman, King at play in the page / Nancy Kline.