A quirky, variegated salute to what Aldous Huxley called “a literary device for saying almost everything about almost...
Should essays be light and playful, hard and serious, or both? Some 50 experts on the form, ranging across 400 years, tackle the question in this odd volume, edited by Klaus, founding director of University of Iowa’s Nonfiction Writing Program (The Made Up Self: Impersonation in the Personal Essay, 2010, etc.), and Stuckey-French (English/Florida State Univ.; The American Essay in the American Century, 2011).
“A genuine essay,” writes Cynthia Ozick, “has no educational, polemical, or sociopolitical use; it is the movement of a free mind at play.” It is “science, minus the explicit proof” (José Ortega y Gasset), “spontaneous and audacious” (Enrique Amberson Imbert), “a walk, an excursion, not a business trip” (Michael Hamburger). It is personal, “a piece of Autobiography” (Charles Lamb), but only to a point. “Never to be yourself and yet always—that is the problem,” writes Virginia Woolf. To essay means “to try but not to attempt,” writes William Carlos Williams; according to Jean Starobinski, it means to weigh. Not so, says André Belleau: ”The essay is not a weighing, an evaluation of ideas; it is a swarm of idea-words.” Through the ages, the word has become a catchall for reviews, sermons and lectures, among other forms of expression. In the late 19th century, William Dean Howells bemoaned the day “when the essay began to confuse itself with the article, and to assume an obligation of constancy to premises and conclusions” Like a classic essay itself, this book approaches its neither-fish-nor-fowl subject from many angles; it bemoans the death of the form, salutes its hearty endurance and both inspires and alienates.
A quirky, variegated salute to what Aldous Huxley called “a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything.”Pub Date: March 15, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-60938-076-2
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Univ. of Iowa
Review Posted Online: Jan. 23, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2012
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
This is not the Nutcracker sweet, as passed on by Tchaikovsky and Marius Petipa. No, this is the original Hoffmann tale of 1816, in which the froth of Christmas revelry occasionally parts to let the dark underside of childhood fantasies and fears peek through. The boundaries between dream and reality fade, just as Godfather Drosselmeier, the Nutcracker's creator, is seen as alternately sinister and jolly. And Italian artist Roberto Innocenti gives an errily realistic air to Marie's dreams, in richly detailed illustrations touched by a mysterious light. A beautiful version of this classic tale, which will captivate adults and children alike. (Nutcracker; $35.00; Oct. 28, 1996; 136 pp.; 0-15-100227-4)
Pub Date: Oct. 28, 1996
ISBN: 0-15-100227-4
Page Count: 136
Publisher: Harcourt
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1996
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