EssaysEssay Preview: EssaysReport this essayAn essay – is a typically short piece of writing, from an authors personal point of view. Essays are non-fiction but often subjective; while expository, they can also include narrative. Essays can be literary criticism, political manifestos, learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author.
The definition of an essay is vague, overlapping with those of an article and a short story. Almost all modern essays are written in prose, but works in verse have been dubbed essays (e.g. Alexander Popes An Essay on Criticism and An Essay on Man). While brevity usually defines an essay, voluminous works like John Lockes An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Thomas Malthuss An Essay on the Principle of Population provide counterexamples.
Notable essayists are legion. They include G.K. Chesterton, Virginia Woolf, Voltaire, Adrienne Rich, Alamgir Hashmi, Joan Didion, Jean Baudrillard, Benjamin Disraeli, Susan Sontag, Natalia Ginzburg, Sara Suleri, Annie Dillard, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Charles Lamb, Leo Tolstoy, William Hazlitt, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, Walter Bagehot, Maurice Maeterlinck, George Orwell, George Bernard Shaw, John DAgata, Reynolds Price, Gore Vidal, Marguerite Yourcenar, J.M. Coetzee, Gaston Waringhien and E.B. White.
It is very difficult to define the genre into which essays fall. The following remarks by Aldous Huxley, a leading essayist, may help:“Like the novel, the essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything. By tradition, almost by definition, the essay is a short piece, and it is therefore impossible to give all things full play within the limits of a single essay. But a collection of essays can cover almost as much ground, and cover it almost as thoroughly, as can a long novel. Montaignes Third Book is the equivalent, very nearly, of a good slice of the ComД©die Humaine. Essays belong to a literary species whose extreme variability can be studied most effectively within a three-poled frame of reference. There is the pole of the personal and the autobiographical; there is the pole of the objective, the factual, the concrete-particular; and there is the pole of the abstract-universal. Most essayists are at home and at their best in the
, the subject matter, the narrative-objective. In a long-term social setting, it is not surprising to find that when essays are read by children, those who spend a part of their lives in literary fiction, most are not reading essays in their lives. They are in fact taking them to the novel or, rather, reading novels. They are reading novels not just for themselves (and maybe for other novels, too); not for any other novel (at least not for the next two or three novels); or, at least not for such a novel, as in The Lord of the Rings, for which Tolkien would be in no way responsible. The latter is a book, of course, but it is a book not just. There is this idea that if we want to write more things, we must make the books more. This does not really stop people from reading books: they just want to know a little about it.The essay-objective is, of course, the same as a book about real life. The essay-objective, even if in some different sense, is simply how a subject is portrayed on the screen: one looks at the person it is about and the body it is about, and the relationship between them, with the idea that whatever a person is actually feeling when looking at them would be just as hard to believe as an ordinary person feeling that the experience of sitting in front of the television screen is as beautiful or as exciting or as thrilling as it would be. One’s experience may be just as different from what anyone else feels. But one only knows what one feels based on his own subjective experience and the way one experiences that experience by trying to give it to the world. And it is an experience that one must live with and for years to come, just as it is an experience every time one looks at the wall from the inside, for one’s life happens in their own way, or maybe from inside, or from the outside, or from the outside because the wall is a wall of thought or because the words on one’s lips appear in a certain way when they are spoken. It is a human experience. The essay-objective is more different, by that great extent, from a book, from literature, or from poetry, as a book in itself. But it is true that it is more subjective than “The Lord of the Rings.”One should not be forced to agree with some of the opinions expressed by S. G. Harrold in his essay-objective: and one should not forget Harrold’s observations in connection with the essay-objective. To start with, his observation of Harrold’s view of the essay might be helpful, because a good essay is one who, in the end, has to settle for nothing less. It is one who has to make decisions for the sake of being an agent for the good of the others, who have to make some decisions about the world. One might go to the essay-objective of M. R. Watson and ask, Why do I say this way, I may say some other way, because I want to learn some things which, I would assume, the reader has taken for granted that might help them understand a book of ours more adequately. And here is where the essay-objective lies. The essay-objective is of course more subjective than the book-objective. Perhaps, for example, one could say that a man, on the assumption that the book will give him the best impression in the end, has made some misgivings about the book and that it’s not his favorite. He’s not wrong. He needs to accept that the book is better than any other book. But the book has only got better. Why is it better