On Essays in General
Contents
On the History and Nature of the Essay; Reading Essays and Reading About Essays; Examples; Serial Literature; Reference; Critical Studies; Practical Guides;
Electronic Resources; Individual Essayists.
On the History and Nature of the Essay
In 2008, Chris Arthur took part in a Summer School at the University of Wales, Lampeter (other keynote speakers included poet, playwright, novelist and librettist Michael Symmons Roberts). This is an extract from the first of Arthur's lectures, "Defending Loose Sally's Honour: An Introduction to the Fourth Genre."
... "As I'm sure most of you will have guessed, my "Loose Sally" doesn't refer to some dubious lady of the night. The name comes from a definition that appears in Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English Language. In this great work, first published in 1755, Johnson described a particular type of writing as being "a loose sally of the mind". It's this type of writing that I wish to champion — or, I should say, what this type of writing has evolved into two and half centuries after Johnson so defined it.
I wish I could avoid for longer the common name given to what Johnson defined in this way, but I don't think I can without being tortuously indirect. He was speaking about the essay. Unfortunately, "essay" carries so many negative associations that the word can't be used without qualification. On its own, it acts as a kiss of death in terms of attracting readers. I imagine it can have a similarly toxic impact on an audience. Too many people equate "essay" with the assignments they had to do at school or university. If it's not stuck in the classroom, the essay often gets locked into a kind of bizarre time warp. This imprisons it somewhere in the Edwardian era as a kind of genteel prose pastime written by people who have little else to do. Graham Good — one of the best contemporary commentators on the genre — offers a depressingly accurate caricature of how "essayist" and "essay" still so often strike people. These words, he says,
"Conjure up the image of a middle-aged man in a worn tweed jacket in an armchair smoking a pipe by a fire in his private library in a country house somewhere in southern England, in about 1910, maundering on about the delights of idleness, country walks, tobacco, old wine and old books, blissfully unaware that he and his entire culture are about to be swept away."
This type of essay — miles removed from the vigorous, edgy, unconventional and challenging writing being done in the genre today — is witheringly characterized by Ian Hamilton as the "something-about-next-to-nothing school" involving "virtuoso feats of pointless eloquence." Unless the deadwood of these outmoded connotations can be got rid of, "essay" just sounds tedious.
... Today's essays stem from a confluence of many tributaries, the sources of which are not always clear, nor is it easy to map their meanderings or determine where one river of words merged with another in the great watercourse of prose in which our wordy species swims. Montaigne (1533-1592) is usually presented as the inventor of this form, with Sir Francis Bacon (1561-1626) named as its originator in English — leading on to that famous duo of periodical essayists, Joseph Addison (1672-1719) and Richard Steele (1672-1729) — and from them, in various leaps and bounds (Johnson, Goldsmith, Lamb, Hazlitt, Carlyle, Thackeray, Stevenson, Belloc, Chesterton) to Woolf and Orwell, with whose contributions histories of this particular vein too often stop, as if the genre was now of merely historical interest.
This genealogy, whose rosary of famous names I've just recited, is, I'm afraid, of highly dubious legitimacy. As Terence Cave has recently argued, there's a world of difference between Montaigne's "essais" and Lamb's "essays". I'm not at all convinced that contemporary "creative nonfiction" ("a singularly unlovely and antiseptic term", according to Rachel Blau DuPlessis) could trace its bloodline back to Addison and Steele, or that it would want to. In any case, I'm more interested in writing essays than in tracing their literary ancestry, or in finding a name for the genre which is less embedded in misconception and negative connotation.
Sir Richard Steele (1672-1729), incidentally, the Irish writer who had such an impact on the English essay, and who has sometimes been called "the father of journalism" died not far from here. Eight years ago, somewhat gruesomely, work on levelling the floor of St Peter's Church Carmarthen turned up Steele's skull. Perhaps we should have organized a field trip! There's a good article about the find, which also provides some background on Steele, in The Guardian.
Whatever conclusions we reach about the provenance of the essay, when we're thinking about its origin and development we need to remember that the Western perspective is only one, and the English essay is not its sole representative. In his book on and entitled The Chinese Essay (2000), David Pollard includes examples from the work of essayists who lived centuries before Montaigne. Looking to the Classical world, we can also point to proto-essayists in figures like Cicero, Plutarch and Seneca. There are many national traditions of essay writing. The French essay, the English essay and the American essay are particularly rich seams in the deposits of this genre, but they are by no means the only ones. Scholars can identify key figures along the way and plot out how they've influenced each other, they can categorize essays into types — the personal essay, the nature essay, the medical essay and so on — but it's impossible to be sure when or where this form first emerged or what its boundaries are. It surely existed before it was so named, and did so simultaneously in different places in different forms. This is not a genre with any single point of origin, neatly circumscribed characteristics or clearly demarcated territory. Though there are some crucially important wellsprings — most obviously Montaigne — who's to say which shard of prose, in which language, in which century constitutes the original ur-essay that set the standard for its descendants to follow? Following a set pattern is, in any case, alien to this type of writing. R. Lane Kauffmann refers to the "skewed path" that essays follow, and to their "unmethodical method." Graham Good talks about "the essay's multiplicity of forms," its "spontaneity, its unpredictability, its very lack of a system." This is a fugitive and unpredictable genre. It prefers the margins to the mainstream, it eschews conformity. It's what William Gass terms a "watchful" form, inclined more to scepticism, dissent and heresy than to any literary orthodoxy.
However questionable the lineage may be, many essayists do claim Montaigne as forbear and there's no doubt that the sense he attached to the word "essai" in 1580 still potently influences the sense in which many practitioners of the form understand it today. And of course his work continues to impress. I was pleased — what essayist wouldn't be? — when one reviewer suggested that I was "a worthy inheritor of the tradition of Montaigne" — though I'm far from convinced I actually deserve this compliment. "Essai" for Montaigne meant "a trial or attempt", and it's the experimental nature of the genre that gives it much of its appeal, the way it allows one to try things out. It offers no set procedure. It is, rather, a style of wondering and wandering in prose that tolerates massive variation in length, in language and in subject matter. As Carl Klaus puts it, "the essay is an open form" which "gives a writer the freedom to travel in any direction." As Lydia Fakundiny says — in The Art of the Essay (1991) — it "obeys no compulsion to tie up what may look like loose ends;" it "tolerates a fair amount of indeterminacy;" it "steers away from logically ordered sequences of elaboration." There's no pretence at closure or conclusion. Essays are sympathetically fragmentary, as inchoate as our lives are.
Essays are rooted in what passes, rather than in what's invented; focused on aspects of "the real world" rather than on what's made up. They're interested in following the contours of reality rather than creating any fictive landscapes. But essayists are not engaged in some kind of naively realist descriptivism. They're alert to the fallibility of perception, memory and expression; to the partiality of personality, the fact that language is not a simple verbal mirror of what is but that it imports its own cargoes into every image. They recognize that their truth-telling happens through the complicated lenses of subjectivity. Robert Atwan touches on some of these issues when he reminds us that "personal", the word we use to convey intimacy and sincerity, has "hidden overtones of disguise and performance", its roots going back to the Latin "persona" which meant "mask". Essayists, as Atwan notes, "know that the first-person singular is not a simple unmediated extension of the self, that the 'I' of the sentence is not always the same as the 'I' who wrote the sentence."
The freedom and flexibility of essays is what most appeals to me about this genre. I'm also drawn to their tradition of individuality, their scant regard for authority and their love of language. I think Graham Good is quite correct when he says that: "At the heart of the essay is the voice of the individual". This voice is very different from the one that speaks in the machine-like prose we generate for reports and articles — the kind of writing that eschews subjectivity, aiming instead for bland neutrality. Such prose is carefully gutted, the innards of feeling taken out, supposedly leaving only the lean muscle of objectivity. Every trace of the "I" is exorcised; the words are purged of any taint of the individual. In contrast, essayists draw on the personal with all its idiosyncratic passions and puzzles. It's a hard form to define and I'm not going to try — in fact I'd agree with Douglas Atkins that essays represent "an implicit critique of the drive towards definition." A final reason why I like this genre before proceeding with some readings: Alexander Smith once said that essays are concerned with "the infinite suggestiveness of common things." I'm drawn to the everyday epiphanies such suggestiveness sparks and like the freedom essays offer for exploring them."
© Chris Arthur 2008
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"Writing is the monumentally complex operation whereby experience, insight, and imagination are distilled into language; reading is the equally complex operation that disperses these distilled elements into another person's life. The act only begins with the active deciphering of the symbols. It ends (if reading can be said to end at all) where we cannot easily track it, where the atmospheres of self condense into thought and action ... The writing process begins in the writer, the life; but it branches off into paper, into artifice; but the final restless resting place of every written thing is the solitary life of the reader. There it hibernates, a cluster of stray images, forgotten incitements and conversational asides, a mass of shadow wrapping itself around the thoughts and gestures of the self."
Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in An Electronic Age (Faber, New York: 1994), pp.96 & 108
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A good way to get a sense of the richness and diversity of this type of writing is to read the 20+ volumes of Robert Atwan's The Best American Essays. These offer intelligent introductions and a rich annual anthology that gathers material from a range of America's premier literary journals. (The series has been published since 1986 under Atwan's direction as series editor, but with a different guest editor each year. Published by Ticknor & Fields up to 1993 and by Houghton Mifflin from 1994 to date.)
The best single-volume anthologies are Lydia Fakundiny's The Art of the Essay (Houghton Mifflin, Boston: 1991) and Philip Lopate's The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present (Doubleday/Anchor, New York: 1994). Both contain selections that include classic examples of the genre and some less expected candidates. Both provide intelligent commentary. Fakundiny's volume is particularly useful because of her introduction, "On Approaching the Essay", which gives a brilliant characterisation of the form. Her sections on "Montaigne and the Essay" and "Essayists on Their Art" are also good.
Other anthologies worth noting are: John Gross's The Oxford Book of Essays (1991); Ian Hamilton's Penguin Book of Twentieth Century Essays (1999); Carl Klaus, Chris Anderson & Rebecca Faery's In Depth: Essayists for our Time (1990); Bill Roorbach's Contemporary Creative Nonfiction: the Art of Truth (2001); and John D'Agata's The Next American Essay (2003). D'Agata takes a year-by-year approach from 1975 to 2003, offering an idiosyncratic introduction prefacing the essay chosen for each year (in fact his introduction is an interesting episodic essay in its own right).
These volumes contain ample evidence, if evidence is needed, to back up the claim made by Robert Scholes, Nancy Comley, & Carl Klaus that the essay should be regarded, alongside drama, poetry and fiction, as one of the four basic forms of literature (see their Elements of Literature, 4th edition (1991), p.xxvii).
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Further examples of the genre with right up to the minute examples of contemporary writing can be found across a wide range of literary journals. Again, Robert Atwan's The Best American Essays is a key resource, not only in terms of the work it anthologises, but for its annual list of "Notable Essays" of the year. This list can be used to identify which journals are publishing material of this type.
Some journals are exclusively concerned with creative nonfiction, for instance Creative Nonfiction, edited by Lee Gutkind, which started publication in 1993, or Fourth Genre, or River Teeth. Arguably the most interesting essays appear in journals with mixed content (e.g. Southwest Review, Southern Humanities Review). In terms of contemporary Irish literature, Dublin Review and Irish Pages increasingly feature work in this genre.
Both Fourth Genre and Creative Nonfiction have published anthologies which offer a selection of material drawn from the journals. See Lee Gutkind (ed.) In Fact: The Best of Creative Nonfiction (W.W. Norton, New York: 2005) and Martha A. Bates (ed.) 5 Years of the 4th Genre (Michigan State University Press, East Lansing: 2006).
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The key reference work in this area is Encyclopedia of the Essay, edited by Tracy Chevalier (Fitzroy Dearborn, Chicago & London: 1997, reprinted 2001). It's interesting that the editor went on to write Girl with a Pearl Earring, published in 1999, a book that merges fact and fiction in some fascinating ways.
Graham Good, one of the team of editorial advisers, begins his preface to this volume thus: "An encyclopedia of the essay sounds at first like a paradoxical enterprise: how can the essay's elusive multiplicity of forms and themes be contained within the systematic scope of an encyclopedia? The essay is often characterized by its spontaneity, its unpredictability, its very lack of system. Yet precisely these qualities have made it the little noticed (though much practiced) of the literary genres, and hence the most in need of some kind of comprehensive guide. Of course there can be no complete mapping of such a diverse literary form: to define all of its varieties and enumerate all its practitioners would take a much larger volume than this. Nevertheless, Encyclopedia of the Essay does bring together the essential information for exploring this protean form of writing." (p.xix)
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Among the best studies of this type of writing are:
- G. Douglas Atkins, Estranging the Familiar (University of Georgia Press, Athens, GA: 1992)
- G. Douglas Atkins, Tracing the Essay: Through Experience to Truth (University of Georgia Press, Athens, GA: 2005)
- G. Douglas Atkins, Reading Essays: An Invitation (University of Georgia Press, Athens GA: 2008)
- Alexander J. Butrym (ed.), Essays on the Essay (University of Georgia Press, Athens, GA: 1989)
- Richard M. Chadbourne, "A Puzzling Literary Genre: Comparative Views of the Essay", Comparative Literature Studies, Vol.20 no.1 (1983), 131-153
- Rachel Blau Duplessis, "ƒ-Words: An Essay on the Essay", in American Literature Vol.68 no.1 (1996), pp.15-46
- Graham Good, The Observing Self: Rediscovering the Essay (Routledge, London: 1988)
- Claire de Obaldia, The Essayistic Spirit: Literature, Modern Criticism, and the Essay (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge: 1995)
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There are several books, of varying quality, that seek to guide writers in this genre, for instance:
- Sheila Bender, Writing Personal Essays: How to Shape Your Life Experiences for the Page (Writer's Digest Books, Cincinnati: 1995)
- Lynn Z. Bloom, Fact and Artifact: Writing Nonfiction (Prentice Hall/Blair Press, Boston: 1994)
- Philip Gerard, Creative Nonfiction: Researching and Crafting Stories of Real Life (Story Press, Cincinnati: 1996)
- Lee Gutkind, The Art of Creative Nonfiction: Writing and Selling the Literature of Reality (Wiley, New York: 1997)
- Stephen Minot, Literary Nonfiction: The Fourth Genre (Prentice Hall, New Jersey: 2003)
- Robert Root & Michael Steinberg, The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction (Longman, New York: 2001)
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There is some useful web-based material on the essay — the problem lies in finding it! Putting "essay" into a search engine merely results in a ream of references to essay-writing services for students, very little on the essay form as a literary genre. Searching under "Montaigne" and "essai" (rather than essay) gives more useful results.
- "Quotidiana" is an excellent site dedicated to the essay. It's principally the brainchild of Patrick Madden. He and his collaborators have assembled various conference papers, bibliographies and interviews with contemporary essayists, together with an extensive anthology of classical essays. The site also has a section on the "essayest" American essay — where Madden and his students select what they consider the most essayistic essays appearing annually in American literary journals. Madden includes "Room, Empty" — from Words of the Grey Wind — and "(En)trance" — from Irish Elegies — for "essayest" essays lists.
- Bruce Ballenger, of Boise State University, provides a short Bibliography of the Personal Essay.
- Doug Hesse's "Writings About the Essay, Theory and Criticism", although dated, still has many items of interest.
- The following two journals are also interesting: Creative Nonfiction; Fourth Genre.
- Robert L Root's website is also worth consulting.
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Listings here will vary enormously depending on which areas are selected for examination within the broad territory of the essay/creative nonfiction and, within the chosen area(s), which individual writers are then highlighted.
There are many different ways of mapping the various topographies within the genre's diverse territory. For instance, one could proceed nationally (English essay, French essay, American essay etc). As Richard Chadbourne points out, as well as "a surprising amount of agreement" concerning the nature of the genre, "each national essay tradition has its peculiar emphasis" ("A Puzzling Literary Genre: Comparative Views of the Essay", Comparative Literature Studies Vol.20 no, 1 (1983), p.149). The Encyclopedia of the Essay, edited by Tracy Chevalier (and with Chadbourne as one of the team of specialist advisers) offers one possible starting point for exploring the "peculiar emphasis" of national traditions, with articles on the American, Australian, British, Canadian, Chinese, French, German, Polish, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish essay. It's also interesting to look at nationally based anthologies - for example The Oxford Book of Latin American Essays (edited by Ilan Stavans) or The Oxford Book of Australian Essays (edited by Imre Salusinszky), both published in 1997.
That it is not always straightforward to place individual essayists within their "home" national tradition is something stressed by John Wilson Foster in his Foreword to Chris Arthur's Words of the Grey Wind:
"Ireland, of course, has produced its quota of essayists, from Oliver Goldsmith through (among others) Thomas Davis, Robert Lynd, Thomas Kettle, Stephen Gwynn and Filson Young to Hubert Butler. But if Lynd can be regarded as the Irish exponent par excellence of the English essay, it's clear that Arthur belongs to some other tradition, if he is not sui generis. His thought-processes are too unconfined, his subjects at once too spacious and narrowly focused, his procedure too conceptually chaste, and his intention too severely tasking, for the English essay."
Foster points to possible parallels with Octavio Paz or Gaston Bachelard. Is there an identifiable type of Irish essay? If so, in what ways does it differ from the English essay? Though there are, of course, numerous anthologies of Irish poetry, there is no Oxford (or similar) Book of Irish Essays. It is interesting to speculate what the contents of such a volume might be.
John Eglinton's Anglo-Irish Essays (The Talbot Press, Dublin: 1917) might make one ask whether, within the broad category of "Irish" essays, one might discern various "ethnic" types (Celtic, Ulster, Anglo-Irish). It could also be argued that in a twenty-first century context, instead of talking in terms of the American, Australian, Canadian, English and Irish essay traditions, it might make more sense to consider how "the essay in English" is informed by a whole welter of influences in a richly pluralistic globalized culture.
However the Irish essay is mapped, a prominent place needs to be given to Hubert Butler (1900-1991). Dublin's Lilliput Press published four of Butler's collections: Escape from the Anthill (1985), The Children of Drancy (1988), Grandmother and Wolfe Tone (1990) and the posthumously published In the Land of Nod (1996). Penguin brought out a selected essays volume in 1990, The Sub-Prefect Should Have Held His Tongue, and Butler was introduced to the American market in 1996 with a selection of essays entitled Independent Spirit (edited by Elizabeth Sifton and published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux). Irish Pages published a collection of essays on Hubert Butler in 2003 - Unfinished Ireland, edited by Chris Agee. Reviewing Irish Willow in the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies (Vol.30 no.1 [2004], pp.86-87) Denis Sampson is one of several critics to compare Butler and Arthur. He comments: "Hubert Butler is his nearest kin in the field of Irish writing, a figure largely neglected for most of his writing life; it is to be hoped that the genre Arthur has chosen will not cause his unique body of work to be similarly neglected."
Instead of proceeding by country, the extensive, sometimes confusing, territory of the essay might also be mapped chronologically (eighteenth century essayists, contemporary essayists), or according to type (autobiographical essay, medical essay, personal essay, travel essay, familiar essay etc).
"Nature Writing" is one particularly interesting sub-genre. As well as essays by such writers as Annie Dillard, Elizabeth Dodd, Edward Hoagland, Reg Saner, there are some book-length pieces of prose in this area bearing some intriguing similarities to the essay form. Examples here might include: J.A. Baker, The Peregrine (1967); Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (1975); Barry Lopez, Arctic Dreams: Imagination and Desire in a Northern Landscape (1986); and, from an Irish perspective, Michael Viney's, A Year's Turning (1996).
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"Linear thinking takes the article as form, nonlinear the essay." |
G. Douglas Atkins |
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| Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) is often seen as the father of the essay. Nietzsche said of him, "That such a man has written adds to the pleasure of having lived on earth." |
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| John (or Giovanni) Florio (c 1553-1625) was Montaigne's first translator into English. Born in England of Italian parents, Florio became Professor of Italian and French at Oxford. His first translation of the Essayes appeared in 1603. This picture shows his revised edition, published in 1613. |
Quotes
The apt quotation is one of the essayist's greatest gifts.
William H. Gass, Habitations of the Word, Cornell University Press, Ithaca: 1985, p.28
Of all literary forms the essay most successfully resists attempts to pin it down.
O.B. Hardison, "Binding Proteus: An Essay on the Essay", in Alexander J. Butrym (ed.) Essays on the Essay: Redefining the Genre, University of Georgia Press, Athens GA: 1989, p.11
The essay is a brief, highly polished piece of prose that is often poetic, often marked by an artful disorder in its composition, and that is both fragmentary and complete in itself, capable both of standing on its own and of forming a kind of 'higher organism' when assembled with other essays by its author. Like most poems or short stories it should be readable at a single sitting; readable but not entirely understandable the first or even second time, and re-readable more or less forever ... the essay, in other words, belongs to imaginative literature.
Richard M. Chadbourne, "A Puzzling Literary Genre; Comparative Views of the Essay", Comparative Literature Studies, Vol.20 no.1 (1983), p.149/50
As it maps the territory of the self, the essay details the particulars of everyday life, attuned, like Wordsworth and like Dutch genre painting, to the quite mundane and quotidian: taking a walk, mowing a field, observing a moth dying, contemplating a piece of chalk. The wonder is not that art can be made of such ordinary stuff, but that we should expect it to be found anywhere else.
G. Douglas Atkins, Tracing the Essay: Through Experience to Truth (2005), p.68
Essays are making a remarkable literary comeback ... [they] are being written out of the same imaginative spirit as fiction and poetry. And essays can rival the best fiction and poetry in artistic accomplishment. Why not? The essayist, too, can master imagery, character, symbol, metaphor, the ins and outs of narration.
Robert Atwan (series editor), The Best American Essays 1988, Ticknor & Field, New York: 1988, pp.ix-x
In light of the essay's transformations, today's poetry and fiction appear stagnant: the essay is now our most dynamic literary form.
Robert Atwan (series editor), The Best American Essays 1997, Houghton Mifflin, Boston: 1997, p.xi
Often one literary form dominates an era. In Shakespeare's time the play was the thing, and lyric poets and pamphleteers wrote for the stage when they turned aside from their primary work. A few decades ago, American novelists wrote novels when they could afford to but paid their bills by writing short stories for Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post. Today, novelists of similar eminence and ability — Joan Didion, Cynthia Ozick, Alice Walker, Jamaica Kincaid — become performers of the essay, for we live in the age of the essay.
Donald Hall (ed.), The Contemporary Essay, Bedford Books of St Martin, Boston: 1995, p.1
The essay induces skepticism. It is not altogether the fault of Montaigne. The essay is simply a watchful form, Hazlitt's thought is not shaken out like pepper on the page, nor does Lamb compose in blurts. Halfway between sermon and story, the essay interests itself in the narration of ideas — in their unfolding — and the conflict between philosophies or other points of view becomes a drama in its hands; systems are seen as plots and concepts as characters.
William Gass, Habitations of the Word, Cornell University Press, Ithaca: 1985, p.23
Entering the road laid down by tradition, the essayist is not content to pursue faithfully the prescribed itinerary. Instinctively, he (or she) swerves to explore the surrounding terrain, to track a stray detail or anomaly, even at the risk of wrong turns, dead ends, and charges of trespassing. From the standpoint of more 'responsible' travelers, the resulting path will look skewed and arbitrary. But if the essayist keeps faith with chance, moving with unmethodical method through the thicket of contemporary experience, some will find the path worth following awhile.
R. Lane Kauffmann, "The Skewed Path: Essaying as Unmethodical Method," in Alexander Butrym (ed.), Essays on the Essay: Redefining the Genre, University of Georgia Press, Athens GA: 1989, p.220
The essay writer is a chartered libertine and a law unto himself. A quick ear and eye, an ability to discern the infinite suggestiveness of common things, a brooding meditative spirit, are all the essayist requires to start business with.
Alexander Smith, Dreamthorp: A Book of Essays Written in the Country, Strahan & Co, London: 1863, p.25
In our century, when the grand philosophical systems seem to have collapsed under their own weight and authoritarian taint, the light-footed, free-wheeling essay suddenly steps forward as an attractive way to open up philosophical discourse ... The personal essay's suitability for experimental method and self-reflective process, its tolerance for the fragmentary and irresolution, make it uniquely appropriate to the present era, whether we want to label it late modernist or postmodernist.
Philip Lopate (ed.), The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present, Anchor/Doubleday, New York: 1994, pp.xliii & l
[The essay] is not part of any formal system whatever, adheres to the methodologies, the discovery procedures, the criteria for proof of no established discipline. In this way the essay is 'informal.' It steers away from logically or conventionally ordered sequences of elaboration, from introduction and conclusion, from the overly explicit transition; it obeys no compulsion to tie up what may look like loose ends, tolerates a fair amount of inconclusiveness and indeterminacy.
Lydia Fakundiny (ed.), The Art of the Essay, Houghton Mifflin, Boston: 1991, p.17
Current American creative nonfiction has buried the essay, its most interesting form, under a generic mountain of autobiographical narrative.
David Lazar, "Occasional Desire: On the Essay and the Memoir", in Lazar (ed.) Truth in Nonfiction, University of Iowa Press, Iowa City: 2008, p.111
The essay's precarious position between the non-fictional and the fictional also causes discomfort. Literary critics want to know where it 'fits' and are disturbed by the fact that it seems to stretch the fabric of definition at the seams.
Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres & Elizabeth Mittman (eds.), The Politics of the Essay: Feminist Perspectives, Indiana University Press, Bloomington: 1993, p.12
The essay stands apart from both poetry and prose fiction, as well as from other forms of academic writing, in its emphasis upon the actual situation of the writer, and thus upon the personal nature, the 'situatedness', of all writing.
Kurt Spellmeyer, "A Common Ground: The Essay in the Academy", in Alexander J. Butrym (ed), Essays on the Essay: Redefining the Genre, University of Georgia Press, Athens GA: 1989, p. 255
Once generic distinctions start to leak, people bring in anything that might conceivably hold water. 'Literary nonfiction,' 'creative nonfiction,' and 'lyric essay' are some of the makeshift semantic hybrids in current use and designed to catch the sort of prose work which is very like an essay but which exploits the linguistic playfulness, associative logic, and imaginative license of poetry.
Arthur Salzman, Objects and Empathy, Mid-List Press, Minneapolis: 2001, p.viii
Unlike novelists and playwrights, who lurk behind the scenes while distracting our attention with the puppet show of imaginary characters - and unlike scholars and journalists, who quote the opinions of others and take cover behind the hedges of neutrality — the essayist has nowhere to hide.
Scott Russell Sanders, "The Singular First Person", in Alexander J. Butrym (ed), Essays on the Essay: Redefining the Genre, University of Georgia Press, Athens GA: 1989, p.31.
The essay has, then, the potential for being at least an inroad, if not indeed an attack, on monumental discourse because as a form it negotiates the split between public discourse — formal, ordered, impersonal, knowing, with pretensions to universality and fixity, and private utterance — tentative, personal, questing, provisional. If 'composition' is an edifice, the essay is a nomad's tent. It moves around.
Rebecca Blevins Faery, "On the Possibilities of the Essay: a Meditation", in Robert L. Root & Michael Steinberg (eds.), The Fourth Genre: Contemporary Writers of/on Creative Nonfiction, Longman, New York: 2002, pp.248/9
Every essay is the only one of its kind. There are no rules for making beginnings, or middles, or endings; it is a harder, more original discipline than that.
Lydia Fakundiny (ed.), The Art of the Essay, Houghton Mifflin, Boston: 1991, p.4
The overt etymological evidence, always triumphantly brandished at some point or other in studies on the essay, is a constant reminder of what we are all supposed to know and should under no circumstances be allowed to forget: that the word 'essay' comes from the French essai and essayer, to attempt, to experiment, to try out, and further back from the Latin exagium, 'weighing' an object or idea, examining it from various angles, but never exhaustively or systematically ... The essay is an essentially ambulatory and fragmentary prose form. Its direction and pace, the tracks it chooses to follow, can be changed at will ... The very word 'essay' disorientates the reader's horizon of expectations, for if it is associated with the authority and authenticity of someone who speaks in his or her own name, it also disclaims all responsibility with regard to what is after all only 'tried out' and which is therefore closer, in a sense, to the 'as if' of fiction. As with the idea that each essay is the only one of its kind, favouring the etymological definition quickly raises the question of whether the essay can be regarded as a genre at all, or whether it might not represent the very denial of genre.
Claire de Obaldia, The Essayistic Spirit: Literature, Modern Criticism and the Essay, Clarendon Press, Oxford: 1995, pp.2-3
Luck and Play are essential to the essay ... The essay shies away from the violence of dogma ... It thinks in fragments just as reality is fragmented and gains its unity only by moving through the fissures, rather than by smoothing them over ... the law of the innermost form of the essay is heresy.
T.W. Adorno, "The Essay as Form", tr. Bob Hullot-Kentor & Frederic Will, New German Critique, Vol.32 (1984), pp.152, 158, 164 & 171
A form of what we niggardly refer to as nonfiction, the essay traffics in fact and tells the truth, yet it seems to feel free to enliven, to shape, to embellish, to make use as necessary of elements of the imaginative and fictive — thus its inclusion in that rather unfortunate current designation 'creative nonfiction.' It is, we might say, a product of both nature and culture, whether or not the desperate term 'formless form' is quite deserved. Among the many dualisms that the essay inhabits, perhaps bridges, none is more important, I reckon, than later of literature/philosophy.
G. Douglas Atkins, Reading Essays: An Invitation, Georgia University Press, Athens GA: 2008, p.3
The essay is agnostic.
Rachel Blau Duplessis, "ƒ-Words: An Essay on the Essay", in American Literature Vol.68 no.1 (1996), p.29
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| Francis Bacon (1561-1626), who pioneered the essay form in English. |