One of the more significant intellectual spaces in which the essay has been theorized, produced and critiqued over the last two centuries has been the American university and college classroom. This owes in large part to the near universally required first-year composition course, the core assignments of which are usually essays of one kind or another. While this curriculum is particular to the United States context, understanding its dynamics and how those dynamics affect the conception and practice of essay writing is of no less importance for considering transnational contexts, given the extent to which the contemporary American ideal of the essay can be considered another of its many cultural exports – one that has already substantially shaped the history of the essay and one that seems likely only to continue to gain in influence in the coming years. At least since the Second World War and the advent of the GI Bill, the average American citizen has been more likely to encounter the essay as a thing in and of itself – to be reflected upon, to be read as such, to be studied and to be composed in apprentice-like fashion – in the classroom and, for most, likely nowhere else. If genres are ‘ways of doing things’, as Charles Bazerman has characterized them, the genre of the essay does quite a lot. It is, along with lectures and written examinations, the primary basis for evaluation of student learning. It is also perceived as a practice that enables students to embody the values of academia (for example, scholarship and mastery of subject matter) as well as, and increasingly so, the characteristics necessary for competitive status in the workforce beyond academia. Practice in essay writing is conceived as a means toward excellence in all types of writing. In light of these facts, the question of what precisely happens in the classroom, of how the essay is conceived and of how the praxis of essay writing is conditioned and normed, becomes a question of the greatest significance.

This question cannot be satisfactorily answered, however, without considering the relationship between essay writing and the composition curricula in which that writing is situated. Richard Fulkerson once proposed that writing courses always have – and therefore need to explicitly recognize and foreground – their ‘theory’ or ‘philosophy’ of composition.