Bodies of Text: On the Lyric Essay
Amy Bonnaffons
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Suppose you want to write, in prose, about a slippery subject that refuses definition. Something like water, or the color blue. Like the word “lyric,” or the word “essay.”
Beginning, you balk at the question of form. One long block of prose seems to suggest a linear accretion of meaning, building to a thesis—but the more you poke at your subject, the more it seems to spread in all directions, to touch everything you’ve ever touched. Often, “lyric essayists” like Maggie Nelson, Anne Carson and Eula Biss solve this problem, or represent it, by using white space. Each paragraph (Nelson prefers “proposition”), like a stanza of poetry, becomes a little island of text, lapped by whiteness—set against blankness, and in relation to the others. Like music, lyric paragraphs make use of silence. They draw attention to their own density. In navigating them, the reader (perhaps confused, perhaps delighted) becomes a stakeholder in their meaning. Click here to continue reading. |
A Team in the Face of the World:
Dogs as Narrative Agents in Memoirs about Life after Loss
Megan Connolly
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Prior to reading Mark Doty’s Dog Years, Abigail Thomas’ A Three Dog Life, and Caroline Knapp’s Pack of Two, I had not associated memoir about dogs with literary nonfiction, nor had I considered how memoirs that grapple with such intensely human experiences as trauma, loss, and breakups could be made more compelling by centering the role their dogs played during these times of emotional upheaval. To varying degrees, the occasion for each of these three memoirs is loss, but what ties them together is that the narrators answer that loss with the adoption of dogs. Dog Years opens with the decline of Doty’s husband Wally and his death from AIDS. A Three Dog Life begins with a catastrophic accident: Thomas’ husband Rich is struck by oncoming traffic while chasing after their beagle Harry and is left with a traumatic brain injury. And, at the start of Pack of Two, Knapp writes of the sudden loss of both of her parents to cancer, her nascent recovery from alcoholism, and the ending of a long-term romantic relationship. In the wake of these losses, each narrator grapples with how to heal and move forward on their own, and, for Doty, Thomas, and Knapp, their dogs are the central force that helps them to do so. Click here to continue reading.
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The History and Poetics of the Essay
Jeff Porter
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In its directness and intimacy, the essay is the ideal literary form for the twenty-first century. Overwhelmed by an endless flux of information, we inwardly crave the momentary stay against confusion promised by the essay. We relish, as Scott Russell Sanders wrote, “the spectacle of a single consciousness” confronting the chaos of cultural overload to which we awake each day (659). The trademark of the essay is its intimacy, the human voice addressing an imagined audience. We also relish the opportunity to lose ourselves in the wandering thoughts of the writer. Samuel Johnson famously defined the essay as “an irregular, indigested piece, not a regular and orderly performance.” What he called a great disorder we call an experiment in form and sensibility. We eagerly embrace the essay’s nonlinear quality, losing ourselves in its unpredictable twists and turns and moody swings. Getting lost in an essay is not the same as getting lost in a novel. Novels have plots. The essay is famous for rambling, its paratactic structure favoring breaks and digressions over continuity—the kind of disjointedness criticized by Johnson. What Johnson didn’t like appeals to us now. It is the mindfulness of the essayist, no matter how digressive, that offer us a refuge from the hullabaloo of the world. Click here to continue reading.
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