The Essay At the Limits: Poetics, Politics and Form

ISBN-13: 9781350235373 / Angielski / Miękka / 2022 / 264 str.

Malta) Dr Mario Aquilina (University of Malta

Opis

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.

Spis treści

Notes on Contributors Preface Suggested Reading Mario Aquilina (University of Malta) Thinking the Essay at the Limits Part 1: The Essay and the World 1. Erin Plunkett (University of Hertfordshire, UK) The Essay as Phenomenology 2. James Corby (University of Malta) An Essay on the Post-Literary 3. Neil Badmington (Cardiff University, UK) Brief Scenes: Roland Barthes and the Essay 4. Nicole B. Wallack (Columbia University, USA) The ‘Subversive Possibilities’ of the Essay for Public Intellectuals 5. Joseph Tabbi (University of Bergen, Norway) Is Writing All Over, or Just Dispersed? Digital Essayism in TRINA, A DESIGN FICTION Part 2: The Essay and the Self 6. Ivan Callus (University of Malta) Tone and the Essay 7. Jennifer Spinner (Saint Joseph’s University, USA) What the Periodical Press Made Possible: Women Essayists in the Eighteenth Century 8. Rachel Baldacchino (University of Malta) Otherness and the Essay in the Pacifist Work of Vernon Lee 9. Aaron Aquilina (Lancaster University, UK) Margins and Marginality: Jean Genet and the Queer Essay 10. Michael Askew (University of East Anglia, UK) The Essay and the ‘I’: Eliot Weinberger’s Transformation of the Authorial Self Part 3: The Essay, Form and the Essayistic 11. R. Eric Tippin (Palm Beach Atlantic University, USA) At the Limits of Fixité: The Essay and the Aphorism 12. Jason Childs (Independent scholar) Assaying the Novel 13. Allen Durgin (Columbia University, USA) Wallace Stevens, Audre Lorde and the Queer Performativity of the Essay 14. Maria Frendo (University of Malta) Transgression as Transcendence: Essayistic Poetics in Selected Works by Dmitri Shostakovich and Joseph Vella 15. Bob Cowser Jr. (St. Lawrence University, USA) Hersey, Resnais and Representing Hiroshima: Toward an Essayistic Historiography