Excerpts from The Art Of The Personal Essay

Introduction by Phillip Lopate

Ann Staley

Oregon English 2009

• Intimacy is its primary trait

• The writer sets up a relationship with the reader—a dialogue, a friendship

• The essay believes there is a certain unity to human experience

• The personal essay has an implicitly democratic bent

• It has open form, a drive toward candor

• Elizabeth Hardwick says the "soloist's signature flows through the text"

• A conversational approach, the self in dialogue with self

• but, also the desire for contact

• The essay strives for honesty, to be vulnerable

• The essayist's stance is to interrogate her own ignorance & be intrigued by her own limitations

• The essay has a taste for "littleness." It wants to turn something common, everyday, into a meditation

• The essayist must reestablish "the persona" each time

• The essay helps the reader feel a little less lonely and freakish

• The essayist is "on the margins," wants to seem harmless, an "idler, a spectator, a tattler!"

• The essayist is fascinated with perception

• also the past, the local, the melancholy: she erodes the present, mocks the future!

• The snail's track = the essayist's logo

• Subjects are linked to each other by free association, open to meandering and to digression

• The essay is a walk-about

• All essays are addressed to "the common reader" (V. Woolf)

AS A MODE FOR THINKING AND BEING

• The essayist is an accidental philosopher

• uses an impromptu approach, subversively anti-systematic

• hopes to make the transitory eternal

• The essay is unashamedly subjective

• The essayist lays bare the process as she goes along

• The essayist may contradict herself

• and has the capacity for processing doubt

• The essayist monitors the self, helps the self 'gel'

• The genre suits the modern, existential situation, first diagnosed by Montaigne

"surrounded by darkness with nothing particularly solid to cling to"

• The essay is a mode of inquiry, another way of getting at the truth