What are essays or what is an essay? Unfortunately, a huge part of our exposure to the essay arises from within academic context, conflating it with argument, analysis, hypothesis, thesis. This is a very narrow association that constricts the full meaning and potential of what an essay can be. The definition is not limited to an article that proposes an argument, or perspective. In fact, essays can be unbounded, creative, personal, often humorous and sometimes meandering. In reality, it’s form is hybrid, amorphous. In the words of Robert Johnson, an essay is an “irregular undirected piece” and not a regular or orderly performance. Professor Hugh Walker offers the following description: essays are a relatively short composition and something incomplete, unsystematic. Essays have a creative capacity that is fundamentally connected with exploration and experimentation.
Is this a failure to determine the qualities or taxonomy of an essay?— ambiguity is in fact the genre’s strength, literary or not. ESSAY CLUB is real and celebrates the following types of essays:
- Written essays
- Video or film essays
- █████████ essays
- Poetic essays and poetry essays and cryptographic essays
- Life essays
- Strobe essays for ESSAY CLUB
Perhaps to define and better understand the nature of the essay, it could be helpful to excavate its historical origins and discover from where and whence the essay arose. Exploring these origins could reveal the mercurial nature of the essay, or in the words of Aldous Huxley, the essays ability to say “everything about almost anything”.
Join ESSAY CLUB, as we travel down the rabbit hole on the history of the essay.
Definitions and Etymology of essay – In the beginning was the word.
A definition essay is an essay where you take a term and work to define it. How is it possible then to define something that cannot be defined? By searching for it’s origin. What does the history of language, or etymology reveal about the nature of ESSAY CLUB?
The word essay has it’s roots in the French essai, trial, attempt. We can understand this as a trial to explore and test an idea, to attempt to seek the fullness of truth to the best of our current ability. It is related to science and experimentation, as a trial or process of testing; a putting to proof by experiment. It is associated with the act of examining or testing something to determine its quality or validity.
But this definition is not constrained by a medium used. In the weighing of the heart rite, the heart of
the deceased is weighed on the scale against the feather of the goddess Maat, who personifies order, truth, and what is right. If the heart weighed more than the feather of Maat, it was immediately consumed by the
monster Ammit. Søren Kierkegaard, in his written work Practice in Christianity proposes that “To be a man, to live here in this world, is to be put on trial”. Essays are related to the Maater of the heart’s being in the world. Therefore, a new form of essay within ESSAY CLUB that is currently being trialed is called a Life Essay.
Words in our language change and evolve, because language is unreal but alive. There is no other species known to date that can express infinite ideas (sentences) with a limited set of symbols (speech sounds and words). ESSAY CLUB reveres this idea.
Before and After Montaigne
Some consider Montaigne to be the “father” of the essay.
Francis Bacon’s Essays or Counsels Civil or Moral were inspired by Seneca’s Letters.
ESSAY CLUB considers Seneca to be the “father” of the essay.
bibliography
The Ultimate Derivation of Essay by J. P. Postgate
A Puzzling Literary Genre: Comparative Views of the Essay by Richard M. Chadbourne