ABSTRACT
An essay makes itself manifest in a particular way. It does not address the person by name, directly, as correspondence does. The essay speaks to everyone and even to everything. Whereas the letter, the memorandum, and the note do small things, the essay does bigger things. While the syllabus as essay need not be completely prosaic, its prose is key for its composition to literary standards that correspondence lacks. The standard of correspondence is mainly wit; the standard of the essay is full-blown composition. The syllabus as essay works in iterations across drafts and even repetitions of classes and grows and perhaps becomes more economic in its expression or turns into a book like this one. In the most basic sense, the syllabus as essay is fundamentally about art whereas the syllabus as correspondence is most importantly about love.
