Reading Essays: An InvitationUniversity of Georgia Press, 25. 1. 2010 - Počet stran: 296 Approaches abound to help us beneficially, enjoyably read fiction, poetry, and drama. Here, for the first time, is a book that aims to do the same for the essay. G. Douglas Atkins performs sustained readings of more than twenty-five major essays, explaining how we can appreciate and understand what this currently resurgent literary form reveals about the “art of living.” Atkins’s readings cover a wide spectrum of writers in the English language--and his readings are themselves essays, gracefully written, engaged, and engaging. Atkins starts with the earliest British practitioners of the form, including Francis Bacon, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and Samuel Johnson. Transcendentalist writers Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson are included, as are works by Americans James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, and E. B. White. Atkins also provides readings of a number of contemporary essayists, among them Annie Dillard, Scott Russell Sanders, and Cynthia Ozick. Many of the readings are of essays that Atkins has used successfully in the classroom, with undergraduate and graduate students, for many years. In his introduction Atkins offers practical advice on the specific demands essays make and the unique opportunities they offer, especially for college courses. The book ends with a note on the writing of essays, furthering the author’s contention that reading should not be separated from writing. Reading Essays continues in the tradition of such definitive texts as Understanding Poetry and Understanding Fiction. Throughout, Atkins reveals the joy, delight, grace, freedom, and wisdom of “the glorious essay.” |
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... thus to assist students and faculty alike in the burgeoning courses in the essay. In the following pages, I am unabashedly old-fashioned, although decades of work in theory stand behind these efforts, both {xi} Preface.
... courses in composition and in the essay, the latter an increasingly but belatedly popular and prominent feature of college and university curricula, I have written not just for a college audience; I hope very much that the “common ...
... course, imagining myself on either of their levels). Also, Nicholas Taylor, for his copyediting, andJennifer Reichlin. And once more, Nancy Grayson, associate director and editor-in-chief of the press, was exemplarysupportive ...
... course requirement. You write better, too, when you write about what you want to write about, rather than somethingagainyou are forced to write about. The personal and the familiar essay do not give themselves to specific, dictated ...
... course, yielding to it. It does not blithely assume, as some textbooks do, that college and university freshmen, or even English majors, already know how to read responsibly and well. It does not pretend that this sorry situation will ...
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Montaigne and Bacon | 18 |
John Drydens Prose and Poetic Essays | 34 |
Alexander Popes An Essay on Criticism | 47 |
Jonathan Swifts A Modest Proposal and the Immodesty of Satire | 55 |
Samuel Johnsons The Solitude of the Country | 62 |
An Allegory of Essaying? Process and Product inWilliam Hazlitts On Going a Journey | 74 |
RalphWaldo Emersons Illusions | 82 |
Scott Russell Sanderss Silence | 167 |
Annie Dillards God in the Doorway | 177 |
George Orwell the Essay and Reflections on Gandhi | 181 |
Cynthia Ozicks The Seam of the Snail | 190 |
Anne Fadiman as Common Reader in Eternal Ink | 196 |
Sense and Sentences in Sam Pickerings Composing a Life | 202 |
E B White as Recording Secretary in The Ring of Time | 210 |
Control of Tone in Zora Neale Hurstons How It Feels to Be Colored Me | 220 |
Henry David Thoreaus Walking and the Problematic of Transcendence | 93 |
Alice Meynells Solitudes | 103 |
Hilaire Bellocs The Mowing of a Field | 110 |
G K Chestertons A Piece of Chalk | 121 |
Or How Should One Read Virginia Woolf s The Death of the Moth? | 128 |
T S Eliots Tradition and the Individual Talent | 140 |
Richard Selzers A Worm from My Notebook | 159 |
Candor and Compassion in Nancy Mairss On Being a Cripple | 227 |
James Baldwins Notes of a Native Son | 237 |
Edward Hoaglands What I Think What I Am | 252 |
The Issue of Process versus Product with an essay by Cara McConnell | 260 |
Works Cited | 273 |