The Essay Paradox: An Attempt at a Two-Column, Binary Breakdown
October 2, 2010
This is some work on the dry-erase board I did one very caffeinated day in class in 2008. Since then, I have tried to break down the ideas of form, genre, knowledge, and the essay further. Here below is a more formal attempt.
| Essay | Epistemology |
| Empirical but used in a much more limited way | Empirical cumulative and progressive |
| Subjective | Objective |
| Anti-Academic | Academic |
| presupposes an independent observer, a specific object, sympathetic reader | “cooperative, public, and cumulative” (Bacon) |
| spontaneous, unsystematic, occasional, even accidental | certain knowledge, a method for finding it, as Descartes |
| exists outside any organization of new knowledge | tries to organize a new discipline on basis of its discovery |
| open mind confronts and open reality | |
| makes claim to truth, but not permanent truth | beginning with Descartes, wants to make a new start for knowledge |
| opposes doctrines and disciplines[1] | learning, discipline, teaching |
| “I speak as one who questions and does not know…I do not teach, I relate” (Montaigne) | eventually evolves into a writing for the specialist audience |
| for the autodidact; no certification required | general reader is discouraged by the specialized tone and style |
| diversity of opinions | any addition to field is limited to those with proper training, certification |
| particularity, emblematic examples, often personal | unity of opinions; general rules from specific instances |
| makes no claim to be definitive; the truth here is a limited truth | knowledge is superseded by successive additions |
| ideas are for the here-and-now, while the sense impressions | |
| “belletristic ancestry,” i.e., literature | “philosophical legitimacy,” i.e., science |
| pastoral mood, detached–>freedom | knowledge |
| ultimately personal, “intellectual poems,” mimetic as well as creative | ultimately impersonal |
| connotative, humanistic, nurture | denotative, nature |
| tangential, leaping, “Dragon Smoke,”[2] “grotesques” (Montaigne) | |
| provisional reflection of an ephemeral experience of an event or object | professionalized literature study |
| disinterestedness ““the object as in itself it really is” (Arnold) | |
| leisure, Flaneur (Baudelaire) | necessity, utility, Pragmatism |
| what do I know? | what do we know? |
| mixture of anecdote, description, opinion | evidence, support, reporting |
| content is “usually” art | strict knowledge that ‘subordinates idea’ (Adorno) |
| “an organ of sublime power”/“parharmonicon” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)[3] |
[1] “Hence,” Good says, “the essay’s neglect in the higher levels of the academic system.”
[2] See Robert Bly’s idea of “leaping” in poetry and literature.
[3] Emerson quote in full:
And here is a PDF version of this whole post, suitable for printing out and lighting on fire.
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Ventriloquism almost…sadly, just so.