The Lost Origins of the Essay | Graywolf Press
More importantly, it was Bacon who made the essay "a definite form" which was soon seized by many other writers who saw it as a "release from a traditional formality" (p.
Video essays are an emerging media type similar to film essays. Video essays have gained significant prominence on , as YouTube's policies on free uploads of arbitrary lengths have made it a hotbed. Some video essays feature long, documentary style writing and editing, going deep into the research and history of a particular topic. Others are more akin to an argumentative essay in which a single argument is developed and supported throughout the video. Video essay styles have become especially prominent among creators such as and .
Alan Sinfield and Lindsay Smith are apt to point out in (1998) that the history of the essay "has its origins in the cultural revolution of the Renaissance" (p.
Definition and Origin of Essay #essay
Such are the oft-discussed formal properties of the essay. And yet the poetics of the essay may not at first glance seem obvious. Georg Lukács wrote that the essay was and was not an art form, that it was and was not the soul of criticism.19 This kind of paradoxical language is typical of efforts to theorize a genre that seems so immune to theory. For Lukács, as for Adorno, the 16 essay’s indeterminate state is one of its greatest strengths, because it allows the genre to accomplish its subversive ends. According to formalists such as the New Critics, however, that indeterminacy disqualifies the essay as a literary form. Being neither poetic nor fictive, the language of the essay was in their view not unique or special. It was, in fact, ordinary because its subject matter was quotidian. There is some truth to that notion. The essay does not usually speak in poetic or overtly literary terms (although there is nothing that prevents the essayist from doing so).
In (1970), Burges Johnson maintains that the distinguished Sir Francis Bacon "borrowed this word essay from Montaigne, turn[ed] it into English and use[d] it as a title for some short prose experiments of his own" (p.
Thus, the history of the essay finds its origins in the core Renaissance ideal of "rebirth" -- the rebirth of the human self.
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David Winks Gray's article "The essay film in action" states that the "essay film became an identifiable form of filmmaking in the 1950s and '60s". He states that since that time, essay films have tended to be "on the margins" of the filmmaking the world. Essay films have a "peculiar searching, questioning tone ... between documentary and fiction" but without "fitting comfortably" into either genre. Gray notes that just like written essays, essay films "tend to marry the personal voice of a guiding narrator (often the director) with a wide swath of other voices". The Cinematheque website echoes some of Gray's comments; it calls a film essay an "intimate and allusive" genre that "catches filmmakers in a pensive mood, ruminating on the margins between fiction and documentary" in a manner that is "refreshingly inventive, playful, and idiosyncratic".
Final Origin and Development of english Essay
The essay writer’s main gift is an eye to discover the suggestiveness of common things; to find a sermon in the most unpromising texts. Her discourses are not beholden to their titles. Let her take up the most trivial subject, and it will lead her away to the great questions over which the serious imagination loves to brood—fortune, change, life, death. The world is to the meditative writer what the mulberry plant is to the silkworm. The essay writer has no lack of subject matter. She has the day that is passing overhead. If unsatisfied with that, she has the world’s six thousand years of history to feed upon.
The History of Essay: Origin and Evolvement
No one would call David Foster Wallace a joyful writer, but the jouissance he lets slip when composing an elaborate footnote in his essays is the joy of digression, a pleasure unique to the essay.17 Other traits commonly attributed to the genre include spontaneity and intimacy, stylishness, the exaltation of the fragmentary, the rejection of deductive logic, whimsicality, the avoidance of erudition, a dislike of dogmatism, an interest in neglected subjects, an idiosyncratic voice, playfulness, an emphasis on human fallibility, and a willingness to expose one’s intellectual insecurities. The essay is also likely to reveal a coyness about its truth status. If truth exists in an essay, it is a function of individual experience and consciousness rather than of any system of thought.
“On the Origin of the Video Essay” by John Bresland | Blackbird v9n1
As a literary form, the essay resembles the lyric, as it is molded by some central mood—whimsical, serious, or satirical. From the first sentence to the last, the essay grows around this mood as a cocoon grows around a silkworm. Essay writers are libertines and a law unto themselves. A quick ear and eye, an ability to identify the infinite suggestiveness of common things, and a brooding, meditative spirit are all that the essayist requires to start. The essayist is a kind of poet in prose, and if questioned harshly as to her uses, she might be unable to render a better apology for her existence than a flower might. The essayist plays with her subject, now whimsical, now grave, now in a melancholy mood. She lies upon the idle grassy bank letting the world flow past her, and from this thing and the other, she extracts her delight and her moralities.
What did the word essay originally mean
Montaigne applies and illustrates his ideas concerning the independence and freedom of the self and the importance of social and intellectual intercourse in all his writings and in particular in his essay on the education of children. There, as elsewhere, he advocates the value of concrete experience over abstract learning and of independent judgment over an accumulation of undigested notions uncritically accepted from others. He also stresses, throughout his work, the role of the body, as in his descriptions of his own bodily functions and in his extensive musings on the realities of illness, of aging, and of . The presence of death pervades the Essays, as Montaigne wants to familiarize himself with the inevitability of dying and so to rid himself of the tyranny of fear, and he is able to accept death as part of nature’s , in life’s expectations and limitations.