Pub Date : 2020-09-03DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198707868.003.0013
S. Evangelista
Walter Pater (1839–1894) saw the essay as the quintessentially modern literary form: a dialectic of philosophy and poetry, yoking together the precious and the commonplace, capable of embodying the scepticism and relativism of the nineteenth century. At the same time, the literary essay was for him a rich source of experimentation in his own writing. In his critical works Pater explored the genealogy and features of essayistic style in a highly self-conscious way, tracing a history of the genre that goes from the Platonic dialogues to Montaigne, while his historical novels are punctuated with a series of digressions that gives them a distinctly hybrid, essayistic quality. In Gaston de Latour, Pater even stages an encounter between his fictional protagonist and Montaigne, in which he brings into focus his theory of the essay as revealing the importance of things found ‘at some random turn by the way’.
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Pub Date : 2020-09-03DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198707868.003.0007
S. Black
The genre of Laurence Sterne’s Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy is a long-standing critical crux. Indeed, the work wears its complex generic mixtures on its sleeve even as it references the great borrowers from whom Sterne learned to borrow: Rabelais, Montaigne, Cervantes, Burton. This chapter focuses on Sterne’s use of Montaigne’s Essays as a model for a generic procedure that informs Sterne’s writing in its organization (or disorganization), its self-conscious gathering of texts, its free commentary, and its interactivity with both its contexts of citation and its readers. Tristram Shandy is a watershed text in which the full range of the essay tradition is revisited, adapted, used, and abused to form a conversational, bookish, self-conscious, and digressive work that is as much essay as novel.
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Pub Date : 2020-09-03DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198707868.003.0017
A. Phillips
This chapter explores the omission of the essay from psychoanalytic literature, both as a form to which analysts refer, and as one in which they write. The absence of the word from the titles of professional publications, and the sense that the essays of psychoanalysts are a truancy from institutional forms, suggest that the essay’s scepticism and unfinishedness are in opposition to psychoanalytic expertise. The avoidance, even repression, of the form reveals what psychoanalysis denies in order to become an institution. As the example of Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality shows, however, the essay’s experimentalism, provisionality, and incompletion are in fact analogous both to Freud’s account of desire and sexuality, and to the serial process of psychoanalytic treatment. The essay’s privileging of the useful and interesting over the right and perfected offers both a model for psychoanalysis, and, despite its neglect, an apt form for its insights.
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Pub Date : 2020-09-03DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198707868.003.0018
Christy Wampole
This chapter analyses the hybridization of the essay with visual genres such as illustration, photography, film, and video, an emergent tendency throughout the twentieth century that underscores the shared features of essayism and Surrealism. These include the use of a logic of digression and free association, a focus on the inner life of the self, the dismissal of formal strictures, the deployment of sensory perception, memory, intuition, and imagination towards expressive ends, and the reliance on images. Beginning with Salvador Dalí’s illustrations for Montaigne’s Essays (1947), the chapter then turns to James Agee and Walker Evans’ collaborative photo essay Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), Chris Marker’s essay-film Sans soleil (1982), and John Bresland’s video essay Mangoes (2010) in order to pinpoint the shared affinities between essayism and Surrealism.
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Pub Date : 2020-09-03DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198707868.003.0015
M. Wood
This chapter explores the revival of various forms of the essay in fiction written in Great Britain from the 1970s to the present day. Angela Carter, Julian Barnes, W. G. Sebald and Kazuo Ishiguro are shown to integrate speculation and reflection into experimental narratives that open up spaces for these notionally old-fashioned strangers. Under the disguised and perhaps indirectly borrowed aegis of Jorge Luis Borges, these writers ask questions about time, history, laughter, invention, and much else. Dark fantasy in Carter, unreliable knowledge in Barnes, trauma in Sebald, memory and forgetting in Ishiguro all give rise to stories that think, and thinking that can’t do without stories.
本章探讨了20世纪70年代至今英国小说中各种形式散文的复兴。安吉拉·卡特、朱利安·巴恩斯、w·g·西博尔德和石黑一雄将猜测和反思融入到实验性叙事中，为这些名义上老式的陌生人打开了空间。在豪尔赫·路易斯·博尔赫斯(Jorge Luis Borges)的庇护下，这些作家提出了关于时间、历史、笑声、发明以及其他许多问题。卡特的黑暗幻想，巴恩斯的不可靠知识，西博尔德的创伤，石黑一雄的记忆和遗忘，都产生了思考的故事，而思考离不开故事。
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Pub Date : 2020-09-03DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198707868.003.0008
D. Gigante
The Romantic essayist James Henry Leigh Hunt, in two essays saturated with nostalgia for a lost world of Enlightenment coffee-house sociability, registers a shift in the cultural place of the literary essay in the 1820s—the era of the cigar-smoking George IV—from an urban public sphere dominated by Mr Spectator and his pipe, to more suburban cubicles of domestic privacy. Through the medium of Hunt’s self-reflective essays on the English periodical essay tradition, this chapter reveals the fate of the literary periodical essay to be linked to a fading amateur culture of belles-lettres and ornamental arts. Hunt blames the early essayists for the result of the civilizing process: the cultivation of a taste for polite literature that has isolated readers and emptied Covent Garden of its intellectual life. The reveries, dreams, and visions of the literary essay made possible by the Orientalized cigar divan (Romantic successor to the coffee-house) reflect the complicated reality of London in an age of global imperialism.
浪漫主义散文家詹姆斯·亨利·利·亨特(James Henry Leigh Hunt)在两篇文章中充满了对失落的启蒙运动咖啡屋社交世界的怀旧之情，他记录了19世纪20年代——抽雪茄的乔治四世时代——文学散文的文化位置发生了转变，从一个由观客先生和他的烟斗主导的城市公共领域，到更多的郊区家庭隐私小格子间。本章通过亨特对英国期刊随笔传统的反思，揭示了文学期刊随笔的命运与逐渐衰落的业余文学文化和装饰艺术联系在一起。亨特将文明化过程的结果归咎于早期散文家:对文雅文学品味的培养，使读者孤立，使考文特花园的知识分子生活空虚。东方的雪茄沙发(咖啡屋的浪漫主义继任者)使文学散文中的幻想、梦想和幻想成为可能，反映了全球帝国主义时代伦敦的复杂现实。
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Pub Date : 2020-09-03DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198707868.003.0004
Kathryn Murphy
In the seventeenth century, the words ‘essay’, ‘experience’, and ‘experiment’ could be synonymous. This chapter explores the relationship between these terms, taking Montaigne, Francis Bacon, and Robert Boyle as key examples. It argues that the essay, throughout its history, asserts the value of experience, rather than metaphysics or abstraction, as the ground of knowledge, and establishes in the seventeenth century a dynamic oscillation between bodily experience, its written transmission, and the experience of reading which is still legible in contemporary essay writing. The relationship between scientific experiment in Bacon and Boyle and the literary form of the essay also suggests that one of the major axes of opposition which defines the essay, in Theodor Adorno’s account—a resistance to scientific rationalism—emerges, paradoxically, from the early essay’s simultaneous concern with experience and experiment.
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Pub Date : 2020-09-03DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198707868.003.0006
F. Parker
David Hume’s philosophical essays of the 1740s offer to bring intellectual reflection into ‘the conversible world’, posing the question of whether this compromises or exemplifies the task of philosophy. Comparisons are drawn with Shaftesbury’s philosophical worldliness, facilitated by the selective nature of the ‘Club’ for whom he writes, Johnson’s more strenuous negotiations between intellectual and social being, and the edgy raillery with which Fielding addresses his public in the essay-chapters of Tom Jones. Against these contexts, the urbanity of Hume’s essay-writing is explored in relation to the implications of the Treatise; the importance of convention and civility; and qualities of ‘reserve’ or ‘modesty’ and the kind of detachment implied in Hume’s ‘delicacy of taste’. The sense of an elusive intentionality, poised against the overt hospitality to contingency and spontaneity which the essay-form equally enables, is traced in particular in the essays that make up the first Enquiry.
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Pub Date : 2020-09-03DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198707868.003.0012
Ophelia Field
This chapter examines the paradox inherent in tackling political issues within a traditionally ‘polite’ form, authorial consciences torn between retirement and public engagement, and the recurring tendency of the essayist to attack complacent readers rather than more obvious adversaries. For some, writing under political pressure, the tactics are indirection or literary insurgency; for others, the essay form itself symbolizes the freedoms to be defended from more absolutist forms of thought. Via readings of essays by Addison, Hazlitt, Woolf, Orwell, Baldwin, and Hitchens, it highlights the forgotten political agendas of declaredly apolitical essayists, while inversely emphasizing the overriding literary, autobiographical, and philosophical ambitions that dominate some of the most famously political of classic English essayists.
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Pub Date : 2020-09-03DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198707868.003.0005
Markman Ellis
Published six times a week, Addison and Steele’s The Spectator (1711–12) offered readers a daily essay, and some advertisements, on the two sides of a half-folio sheet costing one penny. This chapter explores the diurnal production and reception of The Spectator. In their daily sequence, each diurnal essay is an adventure in thought located in a fixed chronological relationship with the others but taking a new and unanticipated direction. Reading the diurnal Spectator offers unexpected juxtapositions of essays on different topics and in different modes and styles. Subsequent republications in quarto and octavo volumes changed the reading experience, especially through the provision of an index allowing readers to follow topics across discrete essays. Indexical reading exposes an ambivalence in the essay form between the everyday sally of thought—the attempt or endeavour—and the more philosophical thinking of the tract or treatise in miniature.
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