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Author: G. Douglas Atkins
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820330825
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 194
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Book Description
The essay, as a notably hard form of writing to pin down, has inspired some unflattering descriptions: It is a “greased pig,” for example, or a “pair of baggy pants into which nearly anything and everything can fit.” In Tracing the Essay, G. Douglas Atkins embraces the very qualities that have moved others to accord the essay second-class citizenship in the world of letters. Drawing from the work of Montaigne and Bacon and recent practitioners such as E. B. White and Cynthia Ozick, Atkins shows what the essay means--and how it comes to mean. The essay, related to assaying (attempting), mines experience for meaning, which it then carefully weighs. It is a via media creature, says Atkins, born of and embracing tension. It exists in places between experience and meaning, literature and philosophy, self and other, process and product, form and formlessness. Moreover, as a literary form the essay is inseparable from a way of life requiring wisdom, modesty, and honesty. “The essay was, historically,” notes Atkins, “the first form to take the experience of the individual and make it the stuff of literature.” Atkins also considers the essay’s basis in Renaissance (and Reformation) thinking and its participation in voyages of exploration and discovery of that age. Its concern is “home-cosmography,” to use a term from seventeenth-century writer William Habington. Responding to influential critiques of the essay’s supposed self-indulgence, lack of irony, and absence of form, Atkins argues that the essay exhibits a certain “sneakiness” as it proceeds in, through, and by means of the small and the mundane toward the spiritual and the revelatory.
Author: G. Douglas Atkins
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820330825
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 194
Get Book Here
Book Description
The essay, as a notably hard form of writing to pin down, has inspired some unflattering descriptions: It is a “greased pig,” for example, or a “pair of baggy pants into which nearly anything and everything can fit.” In Tracing the Essay, G. Douglas Atkins embraces the very qualities that have moved others to accord the essay second-class citizenship in the world of letters. Drawing from the work of Montaigne and Bacon and recent practitioners such as E. B. White and Cynthia Ozick, Atkins shows what the essay means--and how it comes to mean. The essay, related to assaying (attempting), mines experience for meaning, which it then carefully weighs. It is a via media creature, says Atkins, born of and embracing tension. It exists in places between experience and meaning, literature and philosophy, self and other, process and product, form and formlessness. Moreover, as a literary form the essay is inseparable from a way of life requiring wisdom, modesty, and honesty. “The essay was, historically,” notes Atkins, “the first form to take the experience of the individual and make it the stuff of literature.” Atkins also considers the essay’s basis in Renaissance (and Reformation) thinking and its participation in voyages of exploration and discovery of that age. Its concern is “home-cosmography,” to use a term from seventeenth-century writer William Habington. Responding to influential critiques of the essay’s supposed self-indulgence, lack of irony, and absence of form, Atkins argues that the essay exhibits a certain “sneakiness” as it proceeds in, through, and by means of the small and the mundane toward the spiritual and the revelatory.
Author: George Douglas Atkins
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820327611
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 193
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Book Description
The essay, as a notably hard form of writing to pin down, has inspired some unflattering descriptions: It is a “greased pig,” for example, or a “pair of baggy pants into which nearly anything and everything can fit.” In Tracing the Essay, G. Douglas Atkins embraces the very qualities that have moved others to accord the essay second-class citizenship in the world of letters. Drawing from the work of Montaigne and Bacon and recent practitioners such as E. B. White and Cynthia Ozick, Atkins shows what the essay means--and how it comes to mean. The essay, related to assaying (attempting), mines experience for meaning, which it then carefully weighs. It is a via media creature, says Atkins, born of and embracing tension. It exists in places between experience and meaning, literature and philosophy, self and other, process and product, form and formlessness. Moreover, as a literary form the essay is inseparable from a way of life requiring wisdom, modesty, and honesty. “The essay was, historically,” notes Atkins, “the first form to take the experience of the individual and make it the stuff of literature.” Atkins also considers the essay’s basis in Renaissance (and Reformation) thinking and its participation in voyages of exploration and discovery of that age. Its concern is “home-cosmography,” to use a term from seventeenth-century writer William Habington. Responding to influential critiques of the essay’s supposed self-indulgence, lack of irony, and absence of form, Atkins argues that the essay exhibits a certain “sneakiness” as it proceeds in, through, and by means of the small and the mundane toward the spiritual and the revelatory.
Author: Patricia Foster
Publisher: Broadview Press
ISBN: 1554810205
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 287
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Book Description
This is a book on how to read the essay, one that demonstrates how reading is inextricably tied to the art of writing. It aims to treat the essay with the close attention that has been given to other literary genres, and in doing so it suggests the beauty and depth of the form as a whole. At once personal appreciations and acute critical assessments, the pieces collected here broaden our perspective on the essay as a major literary art, tracing its history from William Hazlitt to Joan Didion.
Author: G. Douglas Atkins
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 082033653X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 298
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Book Description
Approaches abound to help us beneficially, enjoyably read fiction, poetry, and drama. Here, for the first time, is a book that aims to do the same for the essay. G. Douglas Atkins performs sustained readings of more than twenty-five major essays, explaining how we can appreciate and understand what this currently resurgent literary form reveals about the “art of living.” Atkins’s readings cover a wide spectrum of writers in the English language--and his readings are themselves essays, gracefully written, engaged, and engaging. Atkins starts with the earliest British practitioners of the form, including Francis Bacon, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and Samuel Johnson. Transcendentalist writers Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson are included, as are works by Americans James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, and E. B. White. Atkins also provides readings of a number of contemporary essayists, among them Annie Dillard, Scott Russell Sanders, and Cynthia Ozick. Many of the readings are of essays that Atkins has used successfully in the classroom, with undergraduate and graduate students, for many years. In his introduction Atkins offers practical advice on the specific demands essays make and the unique opportunities they offer, especially for college courses. The book ends with a note on the writing of essays, furthering the author’s contention that reading should not be separated from writing. Reading Essays continues in the tradition of such definitive texts as Understanding Poetry and Understanding Fiction. Throughout, Atkins reveals the joy, delight, grace, freedom, and wisdom of “the glorious essay.”
Author: Davenport Museum of Art (Davenport, Iowa)
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN:
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 120
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Book Description
This catalog is published in conjunction with a touring exhibition titled "Masterworks in Haitian Art from the Collection of the Davenport Museum of Art," February 1995-March 1997. Beginning with a donation of 19 paintings 28 years ago, The Davenport Museum has developed one of the most comprehensive collections of Haitian art in the US. The catalog comprises several essays, interview with contemporary Haitian artists and artist-survivors of the 1991 coup d'Etat, full discussion and color reproductions of highlights from the collection, and brief description of works in the exhibition. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
Author: George Douglas Atkins
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
ISBN: 0820314536
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 222
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Book Description
In Estranging the Familiar, G. Douglas Atkins addresses the often lamented state of scholarly and critical writing as he argues for a criticism that is at once theoretically informed and personal. The revitalized critical writing he advocates may entail--but is not limited to--a return to the essay, the form critical writing once took and the form that is now enjoying a resurgence of popularity and excellence. Atkins contends that to reach a general audience, criticism must move away from the impersonality of modern criticism and contemporary theory without embracing the old-fashioned essay. "The venerable familiar essay may remain the basis," Atkins writes, "but its conventional openness, receptivity, and capaciousness must extend to theory, philosophy, and the candor that seems to mark the tail-end of the twentieth century." In noting the timeliness, if not the necessity, of a return to the essay, Atkins also considers our culture's parallel "return to the personal." When the essay combines good writing with the concerns of the personal, Atkins says, it becomes a form of criticism that is readable, vital, and potentially attractive to a large readership. Atkins hopes critics will tap into the revitalized interest the essay now enjoys without ignoring the considerable insights and advances of contemporary theory. He argues that despite claims to the contrary there is no inherent incompatibility between the essay and modern theory. As Atkins considers various experiments in critical writing from Plato to the present, notably feminist interest in the personal and autobiographical, he contends that these attempts, although undeniably important, fall short of the desired goal when they emphasize the merely expressive and neglect the artful quality good writing can bring to personal criticism. The final third of the book consists of a series of experiments in critical writing that represent the author's own attempts to bridge the gap between theory and popular criticism, between an academic and a general audience. In essays that illustrate the rhetorical power of the form, Atkins describes the reciprocal relationship between his life experience and a reading of The Odyssey, explains the role that theory has played in his personal development, and chronicles his attempts to find a voice as a writer.
Author: Melissa Matthewson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781076136138
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 232
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Book Description
Tracing the Desire Line follows a writer's journey of opening her marriage with her husband. The story--told through short memoirs, essays, lists, letters, and hybrid prose poems--is an intimate inquiry into one woman's search for autonomy with detours into meditations on music, motherhood, religion, love, and wildness.
Author: Mario Aquilina
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350134503
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 379
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Book Description
In the hands of such writers as Rebecca Solnit, Claudia Rankine, David Shields, Zadie Smith and many others, the essay has re-emerged as a powerful literary form for tackling a fractious 21st-century culture. The Essay at the Limits brings together leading scholars to explore the theory, the poetics and the future of the form. The book links the formal innovations and new voices that have emerged in the 21st-century essay to the history and theory of the essay. In so doing, it surveys the essay from its origins to its relation to contemporary cultural forms, from the novel to poetry, film to music, and from political articles to intimate lyrical expressions. The book examines work by writers such as: Theodor W. Adorno, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Francis Bacon, James Baldwin, Roland Barthes, Maurice Blanchot, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Annie Dillard, Brian Dillon, Jean Genet, William Hazlitt, Samuel Johnson, Karl Ove Knaussgaard, Ben Lerner, Audre Lorde, Oscar Wilde, Michel de Montaigne, Zadie Smith, Rebecca Solnit, Wallace Stevens, Eliot Weinberger and Virginia Woolf.
Author: George Douglas Atkins
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781602582552
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
G. Douglas Atkins here offers an original consideration of T. S. Eliot's essay as a form of embodied thinking. A combination of literature and philosophy, the genre of the essay holds within itself a great tension--that between truth and creative prose. And, as Atkins explains, these conflicting forces of truth and creativity exist not only within the literary format itself but also within the writers and their relationships with the genre, making essay writing a wonderfully enriching "impure art." Exploring the similarities between Eliot's prose and poetry with the art of essay writing, Atkins discovers remarkably similar patterns of Incarnational thinking that emerge in each. In so doing, he establishes for the first time the essayistic nature of the great poem Four Quartets and provides an eloquent reflection on how the essay in all its impurity functions as Incarnational art, an embodiment of truth.
Author: Matthew Schultz
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781946482372
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Fiction. The essays in WHAT CAME BEFORE say without saying. Combining and blurring the genres of myth, essay, and poetry, these small works explore subjects as diverse as the death of Moses, the special relationship between gay men and cats, the movie Titanic, rock collections, and the afterlife.
