Kategoria BISAC: Literary Collections >> Essays

After examining the...

In The Lost Suitcase Delbanco ruminates on the life of the writer and the significance of language as art. The title novella, a stunningly crafted story that is the book's centerpiece, takes as its central conceit a famous anecdote about Ernest Hemingway's early work: Hemingway's first wife, Hadley, going by train from their apartment in Paris to visit him in...

Succinctly tracing the history of the genre in China in his introduction, Pollard then wittily and informatively introduces each writer chosen. The selections themselves include Ye Shengtao's ruminations of making a boat trip to visit his ancestors' graves, Fan Bao...

"I started this meditation on the first day of Lent. I hope to keep going every day until Easter. Each day I go fishing in the water of this internal voice. This week the water's still, this angled pen a blue sail; the hook is lazy in the estuary, the water the color of lapis. So what if I don't catch a fish? I said that I would fish; that's all I promised. I bait the hook with each day's discipline. I have no guarantees that there is anything at all to catch in these particular waters, that something beneath the surface won't grab my pen and pull me under." -from Iconography

When...

Since it first appeared in 1978, the Polish quarterly Krytyka (Critique) has been a showcase for some of the best writing on politics, sociology, cultural criticism, economics, and history from Poland. Founded by a group of oppositional activists that included Adam Michnik and Jacek Kuron, the journal began as an underground outlet for critical political thinking in the period prior to Solidarity. It survived the communist crackdown on Solidarity in 1981 to become the leading source of democratic thought in the new Poland. Today Krytyka is published ''above...

The essays in this collection focus on the essentially moral desire within humanistic inquiry to seek a point of contact between personal experience and intellectual reflection. The book is concerned with the development of a plural vocabulary of transformation that stems from the language of historians, philosophers, feminists, and aestheticians. It delineates a significant and widespread change in intellectual perspective that resists homogenizing the objects of study to abstract conceptual models and structures. What emerges from this volume are personal, responsible, situated languages...

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...

The long ignored philosophical content of Emerson's writings has recently emerged as a central topic in Emerson studies. In Emerson's Pragmatic Vision, David Jacobson enters the discussion, placing Emerson in a line of philosophers from Kant and Hegel to Heidegger and Derrida, and adding to our understanding of his philosophical appropriations and anticipations. In the process Jacobson shows how Emerson grappled not only with basic issues of philosophy but eventually with the value of philosophical discourse itself. Conceiving Emerson's writings as reflective of a continuous...

First published in 1900 Uruguay, Ariel is Latin America's most famous essay on esthetic and philosophical sensibility, as well as its most discussed treatise on hemispheric relations. Though Rodo protested the interpretation, his allegorical conflict between Ariel, the lover of beauty and truth, and Caliban, the evil spirit of materialism and positivism, has come to be regarded as a metaphor for the conflicts and cultural differences between Latin America and the United States. Generations of statesmen, intellectuals, and literary figures have been formed by this book, either...

Reflecting varieties of theory and practice in both verse and prose from the Middle Ages to the twenty-first century, these essays by many of America's leading literary scholars call for a reinvigorated formalism that can enrich literary studies, open productive routes of commerce with cultural studies, and propel cultural theory out of its thematic ruts.

This book reprints Modern Language Quarterly's highly acclaimed special issue Reading for Form, along with new essays by Marjorie Perloff, D. Vance Smith, and Susan Stewart, and a revised introduction by Susan Wolfson....