This engaging text shows students what markers look for in their work and helps them to develop the skills they need to produce a first-class essay. It focuses on all the core elements of effective essay writing, including devising a question, critical thinking, engaging with the literature and structuring an essay. Chapters include clear and concise guidance on meeting marking criteria, illustrated with real students' essays from a range of disciplines, and activities which encourage students to put their new skills into practice. This is an essential resource for all university students for whom essays and coursework form part of their assessment. It is also ideal for further education students and those preparing for university-level study.

This book is about the ambition, in a set of paradigmatic writers of the twentieth century, to simultaneously enlist and break the spell of the real--their fascination with the spectacle of violence and suffering--and the difficulties involved in capturing this kind of excess by aesthetic means.

The works at the center of this study--by Franz Kafka, Georges Bataille, Claude Simon, Peter Weiss, and Heiner Muller--zero in on scenes of agony, destruction, and death with an astonishing degree of precision and detail. The strange and troubling nature of the appeal engendered by these sights is the subject of "The Pathos of the Real." Robert Buch shows that the spectacles of suffering conjured up in these texts are deeply ambivalent, available neither to cathartic relief nor to the sentiment of compassion. What prevails instead is a peculiar coincidence of opposites: exaltation and resignation; disfiguration and transfiguration; agitation and paralysis.

Featuring the experiences of violent excess in strongly visual and often in expressly pictorial terms, the works expose the nexus between violence and the image in twentieth-century aesthetics. Buch explores this tension between visual and verbal representation by drawing on the rhetorical notion of pathos as both insurmountable suffering and codified affect and the psychoanalytic notion of the real, that is, the disruption of the symbolic order.

In dialogue with a diverse group of thinkers, from Erich Auerbach and Aby Warburg to Alain Badiou and Jacques Lacan, "The Pathos of the Real" advances an innovative new framework for rethinking the aesthetics of violence in the twentieth century.