T1 - On the Origin of the Video Essay
An essay is, generally, a piece of writing that gives the author's own , but the definition is vague, overlapping with those of a , a , an , a , and a . Essays have been sub-classified as formal and informal: formal essays are characterized by "serious purpose, dignity, logical organization, length," whereas the informal essay is characterized by "the personal element (self-revelation, individual tastes and experiences, confidential manner), humor, graceful style, rambling structure, unconventionality or novelty of theme," etc.
Essays are commonly used as , political , learned , observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author. Almost all modern essays are written in , but works in have been dubbed essays (e.g., 's and ). While brevity usually defines an essay, voluminous works like 's and 's are counterexamples.
In some countries (e.g., the United States and Canada), essays have become a major part of formal . Secondary students are taught structured essay formats to improve their writing skills; are often used by in selecting applicants, and in the humanities and social sciences essays are often used as a way of assessing the performance of students during final exams.
In a real essay you're writing for yourself.
Unfortunately, the customary divisions of the essay into opposing types -- and informal, impersonal and -- are also troublesome. Consider this suspiciously neat dividing line drawn by Michele Richman:
True, the writings of several well-known essayists ( and , for instance, after the fashion of Montaigne) can be recognized by the casual nature of their explorations -- or "ramblings." But that's not to say that anything goes. Each of these essayists follows certain organizing principles of his own.
All the confusion concerning the essay’s literary status could have been avoided long ago had Homer composed “On Lying,” or better yet “On Dying.” A few centuries later, Aristotle would have wrapped his mind around the form in his theory of literature and that would have been that. Let us imagine such a moment: Aristotle on the essay, the final chapter of the Poetics. All literature, according to Aristotle, is mimetic, if only because humans are instinctively imitative, the one difference between us and other animals. Tragedy is an imitation of noble action, he said, and aspires to a certain magnitude. Likewise with the epic, only there the scale is much larger. Comedy and satire, on the other hand, mimic the deeds of low-life types.
It’s not difficult to imagine the place of the essay in this scheme. Like tragedy or satire, the essay is certainly an imitation, although not of action but of thought. The essay is an imitation of thinking, or more precisely, it is “thought thinking.” But the kind of thought that occurs in the essay isn’t an abstract conceptual exercise; instead, as an imitation of thinking, the essay requires an actor who can perform that role. As readers, we relish the spectacle of the firstperson narrator laboring over the minutiae of existence, struggling to divest himself, as Theodor W. Adorno put it, of the traditional idea of truth.3
Essay writing: Its Origin and Growth
The word derives from the French infinitive , "to try" or "to attempt". In English first meant "a trial" or "an attempt", and this is still an alternative meaning. The Frenchman (1533–1592) was the first author to describe his work as essays; he used the term to characterize these as "attempts" to put his thoughts into writing.
The Lost Origins of the Essay (A New History of the Essay)
The terms used here to qualify the term "essay" are convenient as a kind of critical shorthand, but they're imprecise at best and potentially contradictory. Informal can describe either the shape or the tone of the work -- or both. Personal refers to the stance of the essayist, conversational to the language of the piece, and expository to its content and aim. When the writings of particular essayists are studied carefully, Richman's "distinct modalities" grow increasingly vague.
The Lost Origins of the Essay | Graywolf Press
Montaigne's "attempts" grew out of his . Inspired in particular by the works of , a translation of whose () into French had just been published by , Montaigne began to compose his essays in 1572; the first edition, entitled , was published in two volumes in 1580. For the rest of his life, he continued revising previously published essays and composing new ones. A third volume was published posthumously; together, their over 100 examples are widely regarded as the predecessor of the modern essay.
Definition and Origin of Essay #essay
The terms "voice" and "persona" are often used interchangeably to suggest the rhetorical nature of the essayist himself on the page. At times an author may consciously strike a pose or play a role. He can, as confirms in his preface to "The Essays," "be any sort of person, according to his mood or his subject matter."
Where did the concept of the essay originate from
In "What I Think, What I Am," essayist Edward Hoagland points out that "the artful 'I' of an essay can be as chameleon as any in fiction." Similar considerations of voice and persona lead Carl H. Klaus to conclude that the essay is "profoundly fictive":