Reading Essays: An Invitation / Edition 1

by G. Douglas Atkins

Overview

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.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780820330303
Publisher:	University of Georgia Press
Publication date:	01/15/2008
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

G. DOUGLAS ATKINS is a professor of English at the University of Kansas. His other books include Reading Deconstruction/Deconstructive Reading, which was named an Outstanding Academic Book by Choice magazine; Tracing the Essay: Through Experience to Truth; and Reading Essays: An Invitation.

G. DOUGLAS ATKINS is a professor of English at the University of Kansas. His other books include Reading Deconstruction/Deconstructive Reading, which was named an Outstanding Academic Book by Choice magazine; Tracing the Essay: Through Experience to Truth; and Reading Essays: An Invitation.

Table of Contents

Preface     xi
Acknowledgments     xv
A Note on Texts     xvii
Essaying to Be: On Reading (and Writing) Essays     1
The Advent of Personality and the Beginning of the Essay: Montaigne and Bacon     18
"The Passionate Discourse of an Amateur": John Dryden's Prose and Poetic Essays     34
With Wit Enough to Manage Judgment: Alexander Pope's An Essay on Criticism     47
It's Not an Essay: Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" and the Immodesty of Satire     55
Turning Inside Out: Samuel Johnson's "The Solitude of the Country"     62
An Allegory of Essaying? Process and Product in William Hazlitt's "On Going a Journey"     74
The Risk of Not Being: Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Illusions"     82
Forging in the Smithy of the Mind: Henry David Thoreau's "Walking" and the Problematic of Transcendence     93
Estranging the Familiar: Alice Meynell's "Solitudes"     103
"By Indirections Find Directions Out": Hilaire Belloc's "The Mowing of a Field"     110
Essaying and the Strain of Incarnational Thinking: G. K. Chesterton's "A Piece of Chalk"     121
Homage to the Common Reader: Or How Should One Read Virginia Woolf's "The Death of the Moth"?     128
The Turning of the Essay: T. S. Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent"     140
ASite to Behold: Richard Selzer's "A Worm from My Notebook"     159
The Discarnate Word: Scott Russell Sanders's "Silence"     167
"Love Came to Us Incarnate": Annie Dillard's "God in the Doorway"     177
"A Free Intelligence": George Orwell, the Essay, and "Reflections on Gandhi"     181
Where "Trifles Rule Like Tyrants": Cynthia Ozick's "The Seam of the Snail"     190
Essaying and Pen Passion: Anne Fadiman as Common Reader in "Eternal Ink"     196
Acts of Simplifying: Sense and Sentences in Sam Pickering's "Composing a Life"     202
Caged Lions and Sustained Sibilants: E. B. White as "Recording Secretary" in "The Ring of Time"     210
Her Oyster Knife Sharpened: Control of Tone in Zora Neale Hurston's "How It Feels to Be Colored Me"     220
The Basic Ingredient: Candor and Compassion in Nancy Mairs's "On Being a Cripple"     227
The Work of the Sympathetic Imagination: James Baldwin's "Notes of a Native Son"     237
"On a Line Between Two Sturdy Poles": Edward Hoagland's "What I Think, What I Am"     252
A Note on Writing the Essay: The Issue of Process versus Product (with an essay by Cara McConnell)     260
Works Cited     273

Editorial Reviews

Reading Essays: An Invitation is one that you ought to affirm and go to. . . . It can sharpen your thinking and possibly even improve your writing and expressing your thoughts.

Biz India - Paiso Jamakar

Reading Essays is an important undertaking, a welcome and vital addition to the current literature on the essay, rightly opening that body of scholarship to non-specialists. There is no book like this one, composed of a resonantly ordered series of perceptive critical readings that, at their best, enact the elastic form they entertain. The result is both learned and fresh, carrying forward the project of a 'revitalized critical writing' advocated in the author's excellent earlier book, Estranging the Familiar.

editor of The Art of the Essay - Lydia Fakundiny

In three decades of writing and pondering essays, I have been seeking a book that grasps the four-hundred-year history of this adventurous form, and that does so with the wit, suppleness, curiosity, and emotional and intellectual range one expects of the finest essays. And now here at last is such a book. Atkins reads individual works with a sympathetic yet rigorous imagination, all the while elucidating a mode of writing that is also a mode of thinking, feeling, and living. I am eager to put this book into the hands of students, and into the hands of anyone who wonders why, in our time, the essay is generating so much heat and light.

author of A Private History of Awe - Scott Russell Sanders