Anthony Garruzzo
Dr. Vander Zee
ENGL 299
3/28/16
Assaying the Essay: Emersonian Innovations on the Essay Form
There is no denying the humility behind the name essay, which originally simply meant an attempt. The history of the term begins with Montaigne, who, as a moderate skeptic, would wade into subjects with wariness and self-doubt, always willing to admit the narrowness of his own perspective. Being so conscious of his own limitations, Montaigne would not even aim to be fully systematic in his handling of a topic, rather only venturing an “attempt” to suit his thoughts to the subject, with little method nor any aversion to tangents. While this looseness of form and lack of rigor do still color the essay today, over the years it matured as a genre and, through the work of many noted practitioners, distinguished itself from a mere haphazard “attempt.” Still, such conventions as a conversational tone and an explorative rather than argumentative mood remain hallmarks of the genre and imply a disinclination to meticulous structuring. Form, it may be said, is traded for tone; structure exchanged for freedom. Though overly simplistic, this perspective on the essay it would seem is no serious perversion or distortion of the genre; much of the appeal of the essay in fact derives from its negative relationship with other genres, which, unlike it, compel the writer to torture her ideas into the shape that the genre prescribes.
One of the most famous essayists, Ralph Waldo Emerson, seems to perpetuate the tradition of the tangential, amorphous essay. His works read like improvisations on a riff, to adopt a jazz metaphor, that were stitched together without forethought of design after being plucked from his journals. However, this interpretation overlooks how Emerson’s conformity with the conventions of the essay disguises a purposed formal aesthetic. Scholars have noted that Emerson’s essays substitute the formal apparatus of an argument, which is arranged so as to facilitate the evolution of a thesis, for one that instead develops as the fruition of an idea or image. However, they have not analyzed how this aesthetic constitutes a continuation as well as a subversion of the traditional essay. I propose to undertake this analysis, demonstrating the ways in which Emerson is both a successor to and innovator of the essay form. Understanding this relationship would be important both to conceptions of the essay as a genre, clarifying which formal pivots distinguish the style of a historically preeminent essayist, and to scholarship on Emerson’s formal aesthetic, which too often is abstracted from its generic context. Thus, there is much to motivate the effort to illuminate the bridge between Emerson and the essay.
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