Literary Essays

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In literary essays, students are exploring meaning and construction of a piece of literature. In a review students are discussing overall effect and validity of written work, while in a literary essay students are paying more attention to specifics. Students are taking a piece of writing and trying to discover how and why it is put together way it is. Students must adopt a viewpoint on work in question and show how details of work support their viewpoint.

Like the novel, the essay is a literary device for saying almost everything about almost anything. By tradition, almost by definition, the essay is a short piece, and it is therefore impossible to give all things full play within the limits of a single essay. But a collection of essays can cover almost as much ground, and cover it almost as thoroughly, as can a long novel. Montaigne's Third Book is the equivalent, very nearly, of a good slice of the Comédie Humaine. Essays belong to a literary species whose extreme variability can be studied most effectively within a three-poled frame of reference. There is the pole of the personal and the autobiographical, there is the pole of the objective, the factual, the concrete-particular, and there is the pole of the abstract-universal. Most essayists are at home and at their best in the neighborhood of only one of the essay's three poles, or at the most only in the neighborhood of two of them. There are the predominantly personal essayists, who write fragments of reflective autobiography and who look at the world through the keyhole of anecdote and description. There are the predominantly objective essayists who do not speak directly of themselves, but turn their attention outward to some literary or scientific or political theme. … And how splendid, how truly oracular are the utterances of the great generalizers! … The most richly satisfying essays are those which make the best not of one, not of two, but of all the three worlds in which it is possible for the essay to exist

The research essay leads students into works of others and asks students to compare their thoughts with their own.

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