Table of Content
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Front Matter
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter One: Meeting the Real Self in the Essay
Chapter Two: Meeting the Constructed Self in the Essay
Chapter Three: Cultivating a Self in the Essay
Chapter Four: Imitation as Meditation
Chapter Five: Self Writing in the Classroom
Works Cited
About the Author
Sarah Allen is Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, CO, where she serves as a Rhetoric and Composition scholar and teacher. Her work has been published in Rhetoric Review and in Educational Philosophy and Theory; she also has book chapters in Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing (Parlor Press) and in Research Writing Revisited: A Sourcebook for Teachers (Heinemann). Her scholarship generally explores the ethics of the personal essay, and this work informs her teaching, as she works to discover the most useful and effective ways of assisting students in engaging with difficult, dense material and in generating complex, rigorous writings of their own.
Perspectives on Writing
Series Editor: Susan H. McLeod, University of California, Santa Barbara
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Copyright © 2015 Sarah Allen. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License. 158 pages, with notes and bibliographies. Available in print from Parlor Press online, or at any online or brick-and-mortar bookstore. Available in digital format for no charge on this page at the WAC Clearinghouse. You may view this book. You may print personal copies of this book. You may link to this page. You may not reproduce this book on another website. For permission requests and other questions, such as creating a translation, please contact the copyright holder.
Beyond Argument offers an in-depth examination of how current ways of thinking about the writer-page relation in personal essays can be reconceived according to practices in the care of the self — an ethic by which writers such as Seneca, Montaigne, and Nietzsche lived. This approach promises to reinvigorate the form and address many of the concerns expressed by essay scholars and writers regarding the lack of rigorous exploration we see in our students’ personal essays — and sometimes, even, in our own. In pursuing this approach, Sarah Allen presents a version of subjectivity that enables productive debate in the essay, among essays, and beyond.