Essay Genre Research Articles

ESĖ ŽANRAS KAIP ATSAKAS Į ŠIUOLAIKINIO SKAITYTOJO POREIKIUS

The article reviews the popularity of essay genre in modern Lithuanian and Polish literature. It tries to answer the question of what essay’s features determine its success, and what is so special about this genre that the most important authors have chosen essay as the most appropriate form to express their creative ideas. Essay’s popularity in Lithuania and Poland at the end of XX, and in the beginning of XXI century is mainly connected with the political and social situation changes, but – even though the breakthrough of this literary form had its place more than twenty years ago – the interest in it is not decreasing. What could be the reason for this situation? Which elements of modern culture create such favorable conditions for essay’s development? We could look for the answer to this question while reflecting on the change of communication methods, on which the new media has a huge impact. The new media and its tools change the ways of communication, and reading habits. The essay genre – with its openness, freedom, flexibility and compactness – is the literary form that can meet the modern communication structure the most adequately.

The Illness Essay

ABSTRACTMontaigne invented the essay genre in response to a near-fatal injury. He produced a flexible, wandering form that was especially well suited to confronting illness, injury, and mortality. Literary critics, however, have focused attention on illness memoirs to the exclusion of the illness essay. Given the publication of a number of extraordinary book-length illness essays in 2013–2014, among them Leslie Jamison's The Empathy Exams, Eula Biss's On Immunity: An Inoculation, and Rebecca Solnit's The Faraway Nearby, critics should pay attention to the illness essay. Following Montaigne, these essayists examine the workings of the writers’ minds, explore tangents, and make unexpected connections. At the same time, they take advantage of the hybrid essay, blending memoir, contemporary journalism, and cultural criticism. Their projects overlap in notable ways. They all contemplate how people conceive of their own suffering and the suffering of others. And at the core of their work is a shared interest in the complexity of empathy, which they recogniSe as a felt response, a social practice, a philosophical conundrum, and a writer's tool. In the end, they affirm Montaigne's commitment to using the essay to contemplate how to live a good life.

Introduction

Introduction Christopher Gogwilt (bio), Ellen Burton Harrington (bio), and Nidesh Lawtoo1 (bio) New York, June 2017: Conradian Crosscurrents. The essays collected in this special issue of Conradiana were all originally delivered in one form or another at a conference organized for the Joseph Conrad Society of America at locations a few blocks north, west, south, and east of Trump Tower: Fordham University at Lincoln Center, the Consulate General of the Republic of Poland, the Kościuszko Foundation. The constellation of essays presented here represent only a portion of the wide array of different perspectives on display at the conference. In selecting these essays, the editors have sought to capture the spirit of the event, while foregrounding certain shared resonances across the variety of different approaches to reading Conrad. In doing so, it is our hope that readers might find in these essays a sampling not only of a vibrant conference, but also of the wider landscape and soundscape within which Conrad's fiction currently circulates. Readers will hear a range of crosscurrents that shape the way Con-rad has been and continues to be read. Readers are invited also to hear crosscurrents—and undercurrents—that give critical urgency to the way Conrad is read today. And readers may also hear the resonant promise of future readings of Conrad. The subtitle of the conference, with its double focus on "creativity" and "critique," signaled an intention to bring together two kinds of response to Conrad—the creative and the critical—that are often cordoned off from each other. There has been a veritable explosion in creative responses to Conrad at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Conrad also remains central to arguments across a range of theoretical debates. "Theory" and "creative writing" as labels barely do justice to these two different sides of an ongoing engagement with Conrad. Theory, perhaps especially as embodied by its most iconic practitioners, has rarely been content to remain within the sterile quarters to which its detractors have repeatedly tried to consign it, emerging instead as dynamic [End Page 111] and creative in its own right. Even the most classical of theoretical paradigms—mimesis—turns out not to be quite what "theory" had in mind, according to the insights Nidesh Lawtoo brings to considering its protean form, both in his own essay and in his editorial interventions in reading others' essays. Creative responses, moreover, come not only in the now-classical form of rewritings of Conrad—and in Margaret Cezair-Thompson's keynote we catch a glimpse of an exciting future instance of this to come in her forthcoming novel inspired by Heart of Darkness. Such responses also appear across a range of different media and extending all the way to what Robert Hampson explores under the classification of "uncreative" writing. The genre of the critical essay, of course, usually coordinates this contrast between the creative and the critical. Many of the essays here offer examples of this in reading Conrad's texts through the lens of other writers' rewritings of those texts, including Wiesław Krajka's intertextual reading based on Conrad's "To-morrow" and its adaptations, and Catherine Delesalle's treatment of Caryl Phillips's Crossing the River in relation to Heart of Darkness, as well as Brian Richardson's rereading of Conrad's Victory among other more contemporary versions of The Tempest. The topic of this special issue engages contributors on both the creative and critical side to adopt comparative, transnational, and interdisciplinary readings that open up Conrad studies to the "outside." These include linguistic comparisons with fellow modernist travelers such as Beckett (William Atkinson), postcolonial accounts of Conrad's and Phillips's mirroring images of Europe and Africa (Delesalle), as well as intertextual analyses of Conrad's narratives that cross over to theater and musical drama (Krajka), contemporary poetry (Hampson), cinema (Christopher GoGwilt and Holt Meyer), and extend to maps charting Conrad's (actual and imagined) journeys (Anne Luyat). This also means that many of the essays collected here challenge the critique/creativity divide as well. Some rely on narrative strategies to give dramatic form to critical reflections, a creative move at play in GoGwilt's and Meyer's dialogic...

<b>O ensaio em perspectiva

Current article analyzes the essay genre from its very beginning in the 16 th century by Montaigne to its development throughout the following centuries. Discussions on the text of the essay and its features are foregrounded on studies by Lima, Prado Coelho and Adorno. The unstable, subjective and fragmented traits of the essay are underscored since they provide the genre with relevance and critical importance.

<b> English Major Students’ Perceptions of Academic Writing: A Struggle between Writing to Learn and Learning to Write</b>

English Major Students’ Perceptions of Academic Writing: A Struggle between Writing to Learn and Learning to WriteAbstractEven though writing as a language skill takes a back seat especially with reference to the natural order hypothesis, appreciation of writing in academic settings propel learners to challenge the validity of this order. It is not surprising therefore that writing deserves a higher priority in academic settings due much to its immediate practical application in a variety of academic tasks such as examination questions, essays, research reports, dissertation thesis and so on. In line with this constant practice with writing, English majoring students are quite usually subject to production of texts in the academic essay genre and desire to position themselves in academic discourse community through following the desired academic conventions. However, a considerable number of students fail to achieve the desired proficiency; cultural variations intrude into the language classrooms and differences in meaning learners attach to the writing activities are evident, which makes it necessary to explore students’ perceptions from academic writing courses. To this end, questionnaires on students’ writing efficacy were distributed to the freshman students enrolled in Academic Writing class, and interviews were carried out to have a broader understanding of the expectations from the course. Data from the questionnaire were analyzed using the SPSS and content analysis was employed to analyze the interviews.

Erudição, diálogo e instrução em «Noches claras» de Manuel de Faria e Sousa

In Noches claras by Manuel de Faria e Sousa, among discourses and chapters which serve different purposes, an intense programme of cultural divulgation starts to take form, which offers the readers themes of social and religious nature as well as of moral philosophy, stimulating their intellectual curiosity. By combining the strong didactic aesthetics of the miscellanea, as it was cultivated in the Iberian Peninsula in the 16th and 17th centuries, with the specific features of dialogue, the project gained density and gave way to a more pleasant use than the mere occasional search for information. The variety in themes and sense of erudition, resulting from a wide range of ancient and modern cultural and religious sources, are now seen as part of a more coherent composition, thus overcoming the risks of fragmented reading. On the other hand, the autobiographical drive which can be found across a significant part of Faria e Sousa’s literary production, allows him to come closer to the essay genre, as the author is regarded as the one who is responsible for carefully choosing the material, organizing and exposing it based on his knowledge and life experience which were the marks of the discrete man.

The Development of Content Knowledge Through Teaching Practice

Research on the unique nature of teachers' subject matter knowledge and how this knowledge interacts with other domains of the knowledge base for teaching has been an extremely productive field of inquiry since the mid 1980's. In particular, Shulman's (1987) construct of pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) has been taken up by researchers to describe the subject specific knowledge of teachers in a variety of disciplines. Yet while this concept has been widely applied to describe expert teachers' knowledge, much less research has examined how PCK develops in and through teaching practice. To address this need, the present study examines how one teacher's understanding of a pedagogical genre developed through her first semester of teaching a post-secondary second language (L2) writing class. Drawing on a sociocultural theoretical (SCT) perspective, this study traces the development of a single subject matter concept, points of analysis,as it emerges in teaching activity, is mediated by the teacher's interactions with her students and the researcher, and is eventually incorporated into her knowledge of the analytic essay genre and how to teach it.

A prosificação da cultura e o ensaio criativo do século XX: questões sobre um gênero literário

RESUMO:Este artigo propõe um diálogo entre as teorias sobre o ensaio, gênero híbrido e proteiforme que suscita variadas discussões e tentativas de sistematização, com a teoria de Mikhail Bakhtin, que em seus estudos sobre a prosificação da cultura nos auxilia a compreender as significativas mudanças do gênero ensaístico ocorridas ao longo do século XX.

Israel Zangwill’s Italian Fantasies : Constructing a Self beyond the Ghetto

Fiction writer, playwright, and political activist for whom Jewish identity, if not ritual strictness, remained central, Israel Zangwill used the term ghetto in his early work as shorthand for a Jewish traditionalism that could be viewed as either nurturing or confining as Jews entered modern life; in his 1898 Dreamers of the Ghetto , the ghetto of Venice signified both. Later, however, Zangwill looked beyond the ghetto to other sites and cities of Italy as inspiration for a wider philosophy. In Italian Fantasies (1910), Zangwill used the genre of the travel essay to develop ideas about art, religion, and society that grounded culture in the experienced life of place. At the same time, he sought to solidify his credentials as a significant figure in European thought, a Jewish commentator who was also cosmopolitan and modern, heir to a Victorian legacy of social critique.

ЛЕКСИКО-СЕМАНТИЧНЕ ПОЛЕ „ПАТРІОТ” У ПУБЛІЦИСТИЦІ МИХАЙЛА КОЦЮБИНСЬКОГО

Art publicism is characterized by the direct interference into the life of the society. The subject of the investigation is the analysis of Mikhaylo Kotsiubynskiy’s publicism. The article describes the specifi city of the genre of essay and expression of patriotism in it. Using the writer’s works, the author makes an attempt of investigating the lexical-semantic fi eld PATRIOT that is represented by three micro-fi elds, thus the specific lexemes and semes are separated, the use of which helped Mikhaylo Kotsiubynskiy to enrich the investigated field.

Albert O. Hirschman: A ‘Beamish’ Social Scientist for Our Grandchildren

Albert O. Hirschman: A ‘Beamish’ Social Scientist for Our Grandchildren

More Good News for Nonfictionists

I n our last installment, we celebrated the publication of two new anthologies of interest and value to the readers of Fourth Genre: Blurring the Boundaries, edited byB. J. Hollars, andMetawritings, edited by Jill Talbot. Here, I review two others that fit the same bill. It seems like an embarrassment of riches tohave somany like-mindedyet uniquebookspublished in the span of a little more than a year, and I hope this review will help you discern which of the lot you want to pick up first (before getting all the others, of course). The other two new books I’m referring to are Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction, which is edited by Margot Singer and Nicole Walker, and Understanding the Essay, which is edited by Patricia Foster and Jeff Porter. Whereas Metawritings and Blurring the Boundaries were structured similarly, as volumes of new creative work accompanied by critical commentary by the authors, Understanding the Essay and Bending Genre are not. R E V I E W

Historicizing labor cinema: recovering class and lost work on screen

Workers of all stripes and colors comprise a large and often forgotten segment of cinema history. This essay historicizes several key films and genres associated with early cinema, with an emphasis on pre-Great War French and American cinemas. Simultaneously, this essay formulates several critical responses to labor practices as globally understood and thus anchors this recovery of cinematized working classes, still an ongoing but marginal project in film studies today. Taken together, cinema can refract real-life occupational complexities, class dynamics, and workplace alienation – manifestations that are crucial to, primarily, view class as a social concept and to help us to think through the tensions workers faced under monopoly capitalism. Against this backdrop we must see film's ability to both trivialize class archetypes and capture the complexities as a type of tribute, as the latter becomes a central focus in this essay.

Thematic Progression Patterns In The IELTS Task 2 Writing


 This study investigated the thematic progression patterns in the Task 2, essays, of the writing section of the IELTS test. To this end, thirty Task 2 essays with a score of 8 and 8.5 were selected. Then, the data were analyzed based on the thematic progression model proposed by Eggins (2004). The findings suggested that the selections of the thematic progression patterns were directly imposed by the nature of the genre of essay writing. This means that the writers were required to select the thematic progression patterns in a way which help meeting the general goals and purposes of this genre. The finding could be used in the IELTS preparation writing classes to help the writers, especially EFL novice writers, to achieve satisfactory scores in the Task 2, essays, of the writing section of the IELTS test.

Giving the 21st Century a Try: Canadian and Québécois Women Writers as Essayists

This article looks at the use of the essay genre by Canadian and Québécois women writers since 2000, in particular essay writing by authors known primarily for their works of fiction and poetry. For many, the essay form has served as an ideal venue for combining new, innovative, experimental and “alternative” forms of writing with concerns of personal and political struggle for social, cultural, economic, and even psychological recognition and justice. The article begins with a brief overview of aspects of essay writing by Canadian and Québécois women writers at the end of the 20th century before turning to some comparative observations that suggest convergences and differences, as well as continuity and departures in essay writing by Canadian and Québécois women writers since the beginning of the 21st century. Convergences are seen in the combination of personal commentary on topics of social, political, national and global relevance with experimental use of the essay genre. They are seen as well in the continuum of these explorations and practices from the last two decades of the 20th century into the first decade of the 21st century, even as the latter brings about new forms of essay writing in the use of the internet and the blog-essay. Differences between Canadian and Québécois women writers’ practice of the essay may be seen as well, notably in what one literary and critical community reads and knows of the other. This stems in large part from language barriers and limited resources for translation, though these have been overcome in some cases such as the collection of essays by Nicole Brossard in English translation, Fluid Arguments (2005). Whether writing in French or in English, Canadian and Québécois women writers as essayists have produced and continue to produce important work that calls for ongoing critical attention.

The effect of a socio-cognitive approach to teaching writing on stance support moves and topicality in students’ expository essays

Ability to write focused expository essays in English is the key to academic success for students in an English-medium education system, but such writing can be a challenge for students for whom English is a Second Language. Focusing writing lessons on improving topic content and grammatical accuracy does not always achieve the expected results. Proceeding from the theoretical view of writing as simultaneously social activity and thinking process, this study sought to determine if explicit teaching of the expository essay genre practices and the thinking processes underlying these practices would improve the quality of students’ essays. Instruction featured deconstruction of sample texts and exercises to practise specific thinking strategies and grammar for realising the desired genre practices. Significant improvements were found in students’ stance support moves and functionality of topics in post-instruction essays. The discussion section argues that these findings point to the effectiveness of a social-cognitive approach to teaching writing.

Radioprogrammet Spanarna och essätraditionen – Bidrag till studiet av ett essäistiskt modus

This article discusses current challenges towards the essay genre due to medialization of the public sphere. Up until recently, the essay has been strongly associated with the written and printed word, but essay theorists of later years have suggested that an “essayistic mode” can be traced in several other media, including radio and film. In this case, comparisons are made between Spanarna, a Swedish radio talk show broadcast on public service radio since 1988, and a few examples from the written essay tradition. The article takes a closer look at a special feature connecting Spanarna with the written essay: the paradoxical wish to communicate directly with the reader or listener despite the apparent constraints of the media apparatus. It is suggested that this communicative and sociable vision, expressed through the interplay of oral and written discourse, may be one possible ingredient in an essayistic mode that goes across the ages and exceeds different media.

Isaiah Berlin as Essayist

One of the largest contemporary debates in political theory revolves around the question of how pluralists can justify their political commitments. Isaiah Berlin, one of the first to face this problem, was a self-proclaimed liberal, whose political writings have led to controversy. In this essay, I take up the issue of how Berlin’s use of the essay genre contributes to his defense of liberalism given his pluralist beliefs. I argue that while his reliance upon the essay generates particular interpretive problems, it need not undermine his commitment to liberalism. Rather, Berlin’s defense of liberalism involves a rhetorical attempt to discredit alternatives to liberalism while drawing attention to suggestive ties between history, political judgment, and liberalism.

Pliz cal me: a fictional essay on cellffairs in cellfares

Through the genre of fictional essay, ideas to do with the personal experiencing of mobile telephony in specific situations and contexts in Africa are explored. The essay uses the trope of the much used ‘please call me’ facility as a way into a discussion of the weaponisation of calls and text messages, and the creativity around countering and subverting what should be considered the violence of mobile telephony. Beyond personal traumas associated with receiving and making calls, or texting, the essay points to the instrumentalisation of the sim card in one example of personal self-capitalisation and innovation. Above all, it is about what individuals do with mobile telephony, and how they tailor uses to needs, and needs to uses. The context in which the fictionalisation is situated is a time of rapid and traumatic change in Zimbabwe, and the specificity of particular responses to a life with mobile telephony. The neologisms cellffair and cellfare are apt characterisations of these responses to mobility.

Der Europäer A.W. Schlegel. Romantischer Kulturtransfer—romantische Wissenswelten

Reviewed by: Der Europäer A.W. Schlegel. Romantischer Kulturtransfer—romantische Wissenswelten Jocelyn Holland Der Europäer A.W. Schlegel. Romantischer Kulturtransfer—romantische Wissenswelten. Herausgegeben von York-Gothart Mix und Jochen Strobel. Berlin und New York: de Gruyter, 2010. xi + 354 Seiten. €99,95. The publication of this volume constitutes a significant step forward: not only for a critical understanding of the breadth, depth, and historical reach of August Wilhelm Schlegel's life and work, but also for Romantic scholarship and the growing field of translation studies. The twenty essays of this volume, fronted by a succinct and persuasive introduction by the editors, are the product of an eponymous colloquium which took place at Dresden in 2008. The editors both elaborate glaring gaps in Schlegel studies (his readers must still make do with an incomplete edition from 1846ff.) and make a convincing case for the volume's varied contributions, which can be divided into three main categories: the situation of Schlegel's work in relation to Romantic aesthetics and focal points of recent scholarship; an analysis of Schlegel's own reception and translation practices in the milieu of a transnational Romanticism; and the reception of Schlegel's work in the twentieth century. The range of perspectives and methodological approaches represented in this volume makes it no easy task to provide a concise synopsis or provide a coherent critique, so this review will simply point out a few of the high points as well as one or two comments as a guide for potential readers. One of the more intriguing aspects of the volume, and a recurring theme in several of the essays, is the importance of Schlegel's lectures. While several of the contributions mine the lectures for their thematic content, Manuel Bauer's and Dirk von Petersdorff's essays stand out for laying the theoretical groundwork, such as when the latter emphasizes their dual function of bringing "die Ergebnisse der frühromantischen Theoriearbeit sowohl in einen Zusammenhang als auch in eine kommunikativ vermittelbare Form" (93). Students and scholars of aesthetics will also appreciate Claudia Albert's comparison of Schlegel to Schelling, Schleiermacher, and Hegel, illustrated through a series of diagrams (112-116); this piece also takes the unusual step of connecting questions related to the aesthetic status of dance in the early nineteenth century to a history of modern dance reaching through the mid-twentieth century. There are also essays which stand out either for investigating easily marginalized aspects of Schlegel's work and Romantic research, such as his relationship to Polish Romanticism (Masiakowska-Osses) or British imperialism in India (Bhatti), or for defamiliarizing what are assumed to be "known" quantities, as [End Page 122] in Ulrich Fröschle's essay which takes as its point of departure Schlegel's equation of Germany with the "Orient" of Europe. The questions of how to read this book, or who the intended audience is, do not lend themselves to easy answers. In terms of style and genre, not all essays are on the same level: on the one hand, some still bear traces of the conference paper format, others plunge into an encyclopedic level of detail, and still others function perfectly well in the genre of the literary essay. On the other hand, for a work of this scope, such a division of labor might make sense. After all, the genres of the encyclopedia article and the literary essay are each valuable in their own right—they simply pose different tasks for the reader, and also contribute to the occasional impression that the whole value of this project is somewhat greater than the sum of its parts. Such a composition, a hybrid of the essayistic and encyclopedic, accompanied by a (why deny it?) editorial manifesto for a much-needed critical Schlegel edition, is Romantic in its own right. Given the level of detail, this volume will be most accessible for those graduate students and academics with a prior knowledge of Romantic aesthetics, for whom it should also be required reading. Jocelyn Holland University of California, Santa Barbara Copyright © 2012 The Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System