A fresh look at a venerable, resurgent literary form. The essay, as
a notably hard form of writing to pin down, has inspired some
unflattering descriptions: It is a ""greased pig,"" for example, or
a ""pair of baggy pants into which nearly anything and everything
can fit."" In ""Tracing the Essay,"" G. Douglas Atkins embraces the
very qualities that have moved others to accord the essay
second-class citizenship in the world of letters. Drawing from the
work of Montaigne and Bacon and recent practitioners such as E. B.
White and Cynthia Ozick, Atkins shows what the essay means - and
how it comes to mean. The essay, related to essaying (attempting),
mines experience for meaning, which it then carefully weighs. It is
a via media creature, says Atkins, born of and embracing tension.
It exists in places between experience and meaning, literature and
philosophy, self and other, process and product, form and
formlessness. Moreover, as a literary form the essay is inseparable
from a way of life requiring wisdom, modesty, and honesty. ""The
essay was, historically,"" notes Atkins, ""the first form to take
the experience of the individual and make it the stuff of
literature."" Atkins also considers the essay's basis in
Renaissance (and Reformation) thinking and its participation in
voyages of exploration and discovery of that age. Its concern is
""home-cosmography,"" to use a term from seventeenth-century writer
William Habington. Responding to influential critiques of the
essay's supposed self-indulgence, lack of irony, and absence of
form, Atkins argues that the essay exhibits a certain
""sneakiness"" as it proceeds in, through, and by means of the
small and the mundane toward the spiritual and the revelatory.
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