Essayism

Author : Brian Dillon
Publisher : National Geographic Books
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 45,7 Mb
Release : 2018-09-18
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 9781681372822

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Essayism by Brian Dillon Pdf

A compelling ode to the essay form and the great essaysists themselves, from Montaigne to Woolf to Sontag. Essayism is a book about essays and essayists, a study of melancholy and depression, a love letter to belle-lettrists, and an account of the indispensable lifelines of reading and writing. Brian Dillon’s style incorporates diverse features of the essay. By turns agglomerative, associative, digressive, curious, passionate, and dispassionate, his is a branching book of possibilities, seeking consolation and direction from Michel de Montaigne, Virginia Woolf, Roland Barthes, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Georges Perec, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Susan Sontag, to name just a few of his influences. Whether he is writing on origins, aphorisms, coherence, vulnerability, anxiety, or a number of other subjects, his command of language, his erudition, and his own personal history serve not so much to illuminate or magnify the subject as to discover it anew through a kaleidoscopic alignment of attention, thought, and feeling, a dazzling and momentary suspension of disparate elements, again and again.

Author : Brian Dillon
Publisher : New York Review of Books
Page : 176 pages
File Size : 53,5 Mb
Release : 2018-09-18
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 9781681372839

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Essayism by Brian Dillon Pdf

A compelling ode to the essay form and the great essaysists themselves, from Montaigne to Woolf to Sontag. Essayism is a book about essays and essayists, a study of melancholy and depression, a love letter to belle-lettrists, and an account of the indispensable lifelines of reading and writing. Brian Dillon’s style incorporates diverse features of the essay. By turns agglomerative, associative, digressive, curious, passionate, and dispassionate, his is a branching book of possibilities, seeking consolation and direction from Michel de Montaigne, Virginia Woolf, Roland Barthes, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Georges Perec, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Susan Sontag, to name just a few of his influences. Whether he is writing on origins, aphorisms, coherence, vulnerability, anxiety, or a number of other subjects, his command of language, his erudition, and his own personal history serve not so much to illuminate or magnify the subject as to discover it anew through a kaleidoscopic alignment of attention, thought, and feeling, a dazzling and momentary suspension of disparate elements, again and again.

Author : Thomas J. Harrison
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 296 pages
File Size : 51,6 Mb
Release : 1992
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : UOM:39015024970835

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Essayism by Thomas J. Harrison Pdf

Author : Randi Saloman
Publisher : Edinburgh University Press
Page : 192 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 2014-06-18
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780748656226

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Virginia Woolf's Essayism by Randi Saloman Pdf

Explores the way Woolf used essay-writing techniques to develop her own conception of the modern novel. This book forcuses on Woolf's vast output of essays and their relation to her fiction. Saloman shows that it was by employing tools and methods drawn f

Author : Brian Dillon
Publisher : New York Review of Books
Page : 187 pages
File Size : 47,5 Mb
Release : 2020-10-27
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 9781681375250

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Suppose a Sentence by Brian Dillon Pdf

A captivating meditation on the power of the sentence by the author of Essayism, a 2018 New Yorker book of the year. In Suppose a Sentence, Brian Dillon, whom John Banville has called “a literary flâneur in the tradition of Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin,” has written a sequel of sorts to Essayism, turning his attention to the oblique and complex pleasures of the sentence. A series of essays prompted by a single sentence—from Shakespeare to James Baldwin, John Ruskin to Joan Didion—this new book explores style, voice, and language, along with the subjectivity of reading. Both an exercise in practical criticism and a set of experiments or challenges, Suppose a Sentence is a polemical and personal reflection on the art of the sentence in literature.

Author : André Aciman
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Page : 256 pages
File Size : 48,6 Mb
Release : 2021-01-19
Category : Literary Collections
ISBN : 9780374720216

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Homo Irrealis by André Aciman Pdf

The New York Times–bestselling author of Find Me and Call Me by Your Name returns to the essay form with his collection of thoughts on time, the creative mind, and great lives and works Irrealis moods are a category of verbal moods that indicate that certain events have not happened, may never happen, or should or must or are indeed desired to happen, but for which there is no indication that they will ever happen. Irrealis moods are also known as counterfactual moods and include the conditional, the subjunctive, the optative, and the imperative—all best expressed in this book as the might-be and the might-have-been. One of the great prose stylists of his generation, André Aciman returns to the essay form in Homo Irrealis to explore what time means to artists who cannot grasp life in the present. Irrealis moods are not about the present or the past or the future; they are about what might have been but never was but could in theory still happen. From meditations on subway poetry and the temporal resonances of an empty Italian street to considerations of the lives and work of Sigmund Freud, C. P. Cavafy, W. G. Sebald, John Sloan, Éric Rohmer, Marcel Proust, and Fernando Pessoa and portraits of cities such as Alexandria and St. Petersburg, Homo Irrealis is a deep reflection on the imagination’s power to forge a zone outside of time’s intractable hold.

Author : Joy Williams
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 200 pages
File Size : 47,9 Mb
Release : 2015-10-10
Category : Nature
ISBN : 9781493023714

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Ill Nature by Joy Williams Pdf

Most of us watch with mild concern the fast disappearing wild spaces or the recurrence of pollution - related crises such as oil spills, toxic blooms in fertilizer-enriched rivers, and the increasing violence in our own country. Joy Williams does much more than watch. With guts and passion, she sounds the alarm over the general disconnection from the natural world that our consumer culture has created. The culling of elephants, electron-probed chimpanzees, and the vanishing wetlands are just some of her subjects. Razor-sharp, controversial, scathingly opinionated, and refreshingly unafraid of conflict, Williams refuses to compromise as she lashes out at the greed of Americans and decries our own turpitude. It is not enough to mourn the passing of the natural world, Ill Nature shouts. Get out of our homes and our cars and our cubicles and do something...now.

Author : Carl H. Klaus,Ned Stuckey-French
Publisher : University of Iowa Press
Page : 257 pages
File Size : 51,9 Mb
Release : 2012-03-15
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 9781609380762

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Essayists on the Essay by Carl H. Klaus,Ned Stuckey-French Pdf

The first historically and internationally comprehensive collection of its kind, Essayists on the Essay is a path-breaking work that is nothing less than a richly varied sourcebook for anyone interested in the theory, practice, and art of the essay. This unique work includes a selection of fifty distinctive pieces by American, Canadian, English, European, and South American essayists from Montaigne to the present—many of which have not previously been anthologized or translated—as well as a detailed bibliographical and thematic guide to hundreds of additional works about the essay. From a buoyant introduction that provides a sweeping historical and analytic overview of essayists’ thinking about their genre—a collective poetics of the essay—to the detailed headnotes offering pointed information about both the essayists themselves and the anthologized selections, to the richly detailed bibliographic sections, Essayists on the Essay is essential to anyone who cares about the form. This collection provides teachers, scholars, essayists, and readers with the materials they need to take a fresh look at this important but often overlooked form that has for too long been relegated to the role of service genre—used primarily to write about other more “literary” genres or to teach young people how to write. Here, in a single celebratory volume, are four centuries of commentary and theory reminding us of the essay’s storied history, its international appeal, and its relationship not just with poetry and fiction but also with radio, film, video, and new media.

Author : Brian Dillon
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 44,8 Mb
Release : 2011-02-15
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0865479461

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The Hypochondriacs by Brian Dillon Pdf

Charlotte Brontë found in her illnesses, real and imagined, an escape from familial and social duties, and the perfect conditions for writing. The German jurist Daniel Paul Schreber believed his body was being colonized and transformed at the hands of God and doctors alike. Andy Warhol was terrified by disease and by the idea of disease. Glenn Gould claimed a friendly pat on his shoulder had destroyed his ability to play piano. And we all know someone who has trawled the Internet in solitude, seeking to pinpoint the source of his or her fantastical symptoms. The Hypochondriacs is a book about fear and hope, illness and imagination, despair and creativity. It explores, in the stories of nine individuals, the relationship between mind and body as it is mediated by the experience, or simply the terror, of being ill. And, in an intimate investigation of those lives, it shows how the mind can make a prison of the body by distorting our sense of ourselves as physical beings. Through witty, entertaining, and often moving examinations of the lives of these eminent hypochondriacs—James Boswell, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Alice James, Daniel Paul Schreber, Marcel Proust, Glenn Gould, and Andy Warhol—Brian Dillon brilliantly unravels the tortuous connections between real and imagined illness, irrational fear and rational concern, the mind's aches and the body's ideas.

Author : Thomas Karshan,Kathryn Murphy
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 397 pages
File Size : 51,6 Mb
Release : 2020-07-29
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9780198707868

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On Essays by Thomas Karshan,Kathryn Murphy Pdf

Sets out in a new and authoritative way the history of the essay; explains how the essay has come to mean what it does, surveys the widely various incarnations of the form, offers new accounts of major essayists in English, and traces a wide range of significant themes.

Author : Claire de Obaldia
Publisher : Oxford University Press on Demand
Page : 324 pages
File Size : 45,8 Mb
Release : 1995
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN : 0198151942

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The Essayistic Spirit by Claire de Obaldia Pdf

The Essayistic Spirit explores this potential on the borders of philosophy, literature (especially the novel), and criticism, by referring our post-Romantic conception of literature and literary history back to Montaigne's Essais, and to a whole related tradition of philosophical scepticism. But precisely because of what is implied by 'potential', this exploration never loses sight of what de Obaldia regards as the real limits of essayism.

Author : Lucy O'Meara
Publisher : Liverpool University Press
Page : 235 pages
File Size : 42,8 Mb
Release : 2012-12-07
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781781388273

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Roland Barthes at the Collège de France by Lucy O'Meara Pdf

A full-length account of Barthes' lecture courses given in Paris,1977-80, placing his teaching within institutional, intellectual and personal contexts. Analysing texts and recordings of the four lectures together with his 1970s output, it brings together all the strands of Barthes' activity as writer, teacher and public intellectual.

Author : Peter J. Burgard
Publisher : Penn State Press
Page : 266 pages
File Size : 48,9 Mb
Release : 1992-09-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0271026219

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Idioms of Uncertainty by Peter J. Burgard Pdf

Goethe's essays have been culled for their literary, aesthetic, and scientific content, by the textuality and their location at the nexus of genre and literary history have not received the critical attention they deserve. In Idioms of Uncertainty, Peter Burgard analyzes the rhetorical strategies, structure, and style of pivotal essays and relates them to the essay traditions as represented by Montaigne and Johnson. By formulating the critique of systematic philosophy inherent in the essays and by investigating their participation in the principal aesthetic dialogue of the age&—the Laoco&ön debate, which spanned nearly half a century&—Burgard situates them in the context of eighteenth-century critical discourse. Furthermore, by disclosing the connection between the anti-systematic, dialogic impetus of Goethe's essayism and the theme of community in his literary works, Idioms of Uncertainty both draws out the broader social implications of the essay and shows how the analysis of Goethe's work in the genre can illuminate his entire oeuvre. In the course of the study Burgard articulates a theory of the essay as a genre by drawing on twentieth-century theoretical perspectives for his exposition of Goethe's textual strategies: theories of the essay from Lukacs, Bense, and Adorno; the textual theories of Bakhtin, Kristeva, Barthes, and Derrida; and Rorty's notion of literary-philosophical conversation. Idioms of Uncertainty thus holds interest for those concerned with genre theory and literary theory in general; and through its challenging of clich&és about German literature at the time it assumed international significance, the book will be useful not only for Goethe scholars but also for scholars of the eighteenth century across disciplines and national boundaries.

Author : Mark M. Freed
Publisher : A&C Black
Page : 193 pages
File Size : 47,5 Mb
Release : 2011-04-28
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 9781441122513

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Robert Musil and the NonModern by Mark M. Freed Pdf

Positions Robert Musil's theory and writings within recent critical accounts of modernism and brings him into dialogue with continental philosophy.

Author : Brian Dillon
Publisher : National Geographic Books
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 50,8 Mb
Release : 2011-04-01
Category : Art
ISBN : 9781934105795

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Objects in This Mirror by Brian Dillon Pdf

Objects in This Mirror is a collection of essays on contemporary art, literature, landscape, aesthetics, and cultural history. Beginning with a polemical and personal defense of generalism and curiosity, Brian Dillon explores the variety of themes it is possible today to corral within the rubric of the critical essay. These pieces engage with the work of such artists as Tacita Dean, Gerard Byrne, Andy Warhol, and Sophie Calle; with the ruinous territories that haunt the work of Robert Smithson and Derek Jarman; with the ambiguous figures of the charlatan, the vandal, the hypochondriac, and the dandy. Taking seriously the playful remit of the essay as form, Dillon treats of compelling obscurities: gesture manuals of the nineteenth century, the history of antidepressant marketing, the search for a cure to the common cold. Whether his topic is the nature of slapstick, his love of the writings of Roland Barthes, or the genre of the essay itself, he is as much concerned with the form of criticism today as with its varied and digressive subjects.