Future-Oriented, Backward-Looking

Abstract

The blurb for The Essay at the Limits suggests that ‘in the hands of such writers as Rebecca Solnit, Claudia Rankine, David Shields [and] Zadie Smith, the essay has re-emerged as a powerful literary form for tackling a fractious 21st-century culture’. Mario Aquilina’s selection of these popular authors indicates that he has his finger on the pulse of the essay today. Yet Aquilina, like the authors contributing to this collection, also has the ability to connect contemporary zeitgeist to the history of the essay genre. This is illustrated by the alphabetised list on the book’s back cover, which presents twentieth- and twenty-first-century essayists such as Eliot Weinberger and Audre Lorde alongside earlier practitioners such as William Hazlitt and Francis Bacon. Even Joseph Tabbi situates his forward-looking and contemporary chapter, ‘Is Writing All Over, or Just Dispersed? Digital Essayism in Trina: A Design Fiction’ (pp. 77–97), in relation to earlier essayists such as Henry David Thoreau, Michel de Montaigne, and T. S. Eliot. The ability to move between past, present, and future temporalities is a particular strength of the collection, which was carefully shaped in response to a 2019 conference titled ‘The Essay: Present Histories, Present Futures’ (p. xiv). Inspired by that conference, this collection of fifteen wide-ranging chapters endorses the paradox of looking at the past through the present and thinking about how the essay is oriented towards the future.