Session Eight · Unit Three — The Building and the City
Across the Parkway — Writing the Arts
The Genre: Ekphrasis & the Critical Essay
Main Points of the Lesson
- Ekphrasis. Writing that responds to a work of art. At its best it does not describe the object so much as record an encounter with it.
- Look longer than is comfortable. Rilke learned from Rodin to look until the object looked back. Slow looking is the first discipline of the arts essay.
- Our lobby is a gallery. The History of Shelter, the tile mural by Frances Serber and Nicholas Marsicano, runs the length of the lobby and tells a story from early civilizations to the future. Few writers pass a work of art every day.
- Our architect crossed the Parkway. Paul Cret, with Jacques Gréber, designed the Rodin Museum a short walk from our door. The neighborhood is a lesson in how buildings, art, and lives converse.
- Criticism is also personal. A review or critical essay makes a judgment and earns it with evidence — but the best ones admit the critic is a person in a room.
Reading for Class — Click to Open
- Rainer Maria Rilke, Auguste Rodin, trans. Jessie Lemont and Hans Trausil — read on Project Gutenberg
The poet’s prose meditation on the sculptor he served as secretary. Read the first part. - Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Rodin Museum — visit the museum page
The building Cret designed for the collection — and, if you are able, a walk we can take together. - Textbook: Tell It Slant, Chapter 6, “Writing the Arts” — see the textbook guide
After Our Discussion — Critical Reception
- Rodin Museum — history and architecture (Wikipedia) — Jules Mastbaum’s gift and the Cret–Gréber design.
- Ekphrasis — the tradition (Wikipedia) — From Homer’s shield of Achilles to the modern museum essay.
In-Class Writing Prompt — Laptops Closed
Choose one panel of the lobby mural — or a single work of art you love. Write for five minutes describing only what you can see, no interpretation. Then write for five minutes about what it reminds you of in your own life. Finally, write three sentences that bring the two together.
If the class chooses, we will meet in the lobby before the mural for this exercise.
What happens with this: nothing is collected. It is yours, written on paper, in your notebook. No one is asked to read aloud who does not wish to.
Discussion Questions
- Rilke writes about Rodin’s hands and surfaces more than his ideas. Why?
- What story does The History of Shelter tell? What might a 1939 resident have felt walking past it? What do you feel?
- How is writing about art different from writing about a person or a place?
- Can a critical essay be a memoir? Where have you seen one become the other?
Homework
- Read Tell It Slant, Chapter 10, “Mixed-Media, Cross-Genre, Hybrid, and Digital Works.”
- Write an arts essay of 750–1,000 words on the lobby mural, a work at the Rodin Museum or the Philadelphia Museum of Art, or a piece of music or art that shaped your life.
- Collect for Session 9: one piece of the building’s paper — a notice, a form, a package slip, an old lease clause. (Remove anyone’s personal information.)
For the 2601 Anthology
Essays on the mural and the neighborhood’s art belong to the anthology’s The Building section, beside the braided essays.
Before Next Time — Session 9
Notices on the Bulletin Board — The Hermit Crab Essay. Maintenance requests, leases, lobby notices: borrowing the building’s own paperwork as a shell for true stories.