![]() ![]() The memorable essay, unlike the article, is not place or time-bound it survives the occasion of its original composition. "I am predisposed to the essay with knowledge to impart - but, unlike journalism, which exists primarily to present facts, the essays transcend their data, or transmute it into personal meaning. ![]() "hat finally distinguishes an essay from an article may just be the author's gumption, the extent to which personal voice, vision, and style are the prime movers and shapers, even though the authorial 'I' may be only a remote energy, nowhere visible but everywhere present." After all, Philosophy - which is what he thought he practiced in his essays, as had his idols, Seneca and Cicero, before him - is about 'learning to live.' And here lies the problem with essayists today: not that they speak of themselves, but that they do so with no effort to make their experience relevant or useful to anyone else, with no effort to extract from it any generalizable insight into the human condition." (Cristina Nehring, "What’s Wrong With the American Essay." Truthdig, Nov. If he recounted the sauces he had for dinner and the stones that weighted his kidney, it was to find an element of truth that we could put in our pockets and carry away, that he could put in his own pocket. He was forever on the lookout for life lessons. Montaigne's Autobiographical Essays "Although Michel de Montaigne, who fathered the modern essay in the 16th century, wrote autobiographically (like the essayists who claim to be his followers today), his autobiography was always in the service of larger existential discoveries. Douglas Atkins, "Reading Essays: An Invitation". "he 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 the fictive - thus its inclusion in that rather unfortunate current designation ' creative nonfiction.'".(Edward Hoagland, Introduction, "The Best American Essays : 1999". " Essays are how we speak to one another in print - caroming thoughts not merely in order to convey a certain packet of information, but with a special edge or bounce of personal character in a kind of public letter."." composition, usually in prose., which may be of only a few hundred words (like Bacon's "Essays") or of book length (like Locke's "Essay Concerning Human Understanding") and which discusses, formally or informally, a topic or a variety of topics.". ![]()
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