D’Agata, whose first anthology did not appear until 2003, has hardly saved the genre from oblivion. Of course, D’Agata would say that the essays he collects are not essays, or not those kinds of essays.
They are “lyric” essays—something altogether different. They deal not in information or assertion but in ambivalence and ambiguity; in emotion, exploration, and suggestion.
D’Agata’s rationale for his “new history,” to the extent that one can piece it together from the headnotes that preface each selection, goes something like this.
The conventional essay, nonfiction as it is, is nothing more than a delivery system for facts.
Every piece of this is false in one way or another.
College Common App Essay - Personal Essay Anthologies
There are genres whose principal business is fact—journalism, history, popular science—but the essay has never been one of them.And what makes a personal essay an essay and not just an autobiographical narrative is precisely that it uses personal material to develop, however speculatively or intuitively, a larger conclusion.Near the end of the title essay in Leslie Jamison’s The Empathy Exams, to take the most celebrated recent example, we read the following: “Empathy isn’t just something that happens to us …It’s also a choice we make: to pay attention, to extend ourselves.” The movement that culminates in that passage—from instance to precept, from observation to idea—is the hallmark of the essay.conceptually and psychologically, appears to begin with the term nonfiction.Nonfiction is the source of the narcissistic injury that seems to drive him.If the form possesses a defining characteristic, it is that the essay makes an argument (and does so, unlike academic writing and other forms, for a general rather than a specialized audience).That argument can rest on fact, but it can also rest on anecdote, or introspection, or cultural interpretation, or some combination of all these and more.He gives us Jean Toomer’s “Blood-Burning Moon” and Renata Adler’s “Brownstone” (short stories), T. What we really seem to get in D’Agata’s trilogy, in other words, is a compendium of writing that the man himself just happens to like, or that he wants to appropriate as a lineage for his own work.To be sure, there does appear to be a kind of prose that he’s particularly partial to and that is mainly what he seems to have in mind when he talks about the lyric essay.As for the essay—a form whose exponents in English had included, from the 1860s to the 1960s, Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, and James Baldwin—its prestige was never less than high, and the emergence of creative nonfiction as a rallying point (and of the memoir as a publishing phenomenon) was soon followed by that of the personal essay, in particular, as an increasingly prominent and celebrated genre.The annual Best American Essays debuted in 1986, the first addition to the Best American franchise since the series was launched (with The Best American Short Stories) in 1915.
Comments Personal Essay Anthologies
In Defense of Facts - The Atlantic
Phillip Lopate's anthology The Art of the Personal Essay was published in 1994. Joseph Epstein's anthology The Norton Book of Personal Essays was published.…
The Art of the Personal Essay An Anthology from. - Goodreads
The Art of the Personal Essay book. Read 109 reviews from the world's largest community for readers. For more than four hundred years, the personal essay.…
The Most Anthologized Essays of the Last 25 Years Literary.
For this list, I looked at 14 essay anthologies, plus the three volumes of. The Art of the Personal Essay An Anthology from the Classical Era.…
The Art of the Personal Essay An Anthology From the.
For more than four hundred years, the personal essay has been one of the richest and most vibrant of all literary forms. Distinguished from the.…
Personal Essays That Will Change Your Life - BuzzFeed
Personal Essays That Will Change Your Life. Think essays. You can find it in many anthologies and in The Collected Essays of E. B. White.…
The Art of the Personal Essay by Phillip Lopate.
For more than four hundred years, the personal essay has been one. "The best available essay anthology no matter how crowded the field.…
The Art of the Personal Essay An Anthology. - Google Books
The Art of the Personal Essay is the first anthology to celebrate this lively, fertile genre. Distinguished from the formal essay by its friendly, conversational tone.…
The Art of the Personal Essay An Anthology. -
For more than four hundred years, the personal essay has been one of the richest and most vibrant of all literary forms. Distinguished from the detached formal.…
Must-Read Essay Collections - Book Riot
American Romances — Rebecca Brown Jo Ann Beard 4. Art and Ardor — Cynthia Ozick 5. The Art of the Personal Essay — anthology, edited.…