ENG 295: The Craft of Journal Keeping

(Paula Smith), 4 credits, prerequisite: ENG120. Enrollment cap: 15. The world's most famous diary, kept by Samuel Pepys, captures dramatic moments in London's history, including the Restoration of King Charles II, the Plague, and the Great Fire. In the lively and intimate voice of a diarist, Pepys confesses escapades in his personal life alongside important events in history. In this course we will study the early British diary, beginning with Lady Anne Clifford, who kept her record of daily life at Knole House (and of her fierce legal battle to claim an inheritance denied her as a female) decades before Samuel Pepys set quill pen to page. From looking at Pepys and his contemporaries, we will travel forward into the mid-twentieth century when novelist Virginia Woolf, highly aware of Pepys and Clifford as literary ancestors, chronicled the London Blitz in diaries near the end of her life. Throughout this course each student will keep a diary (or, to use the more common term now, a "journal") to practice var ied methods of writing and to capture impressions of London in the 21st century, just as all diarists respond to the history happening around them.