Comments on: What’s Wrong With the American Essay?

By: Susan Stinson

Susan Stinson — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 20:45:47 +0000

I’m cruising by as I’m struggling to write an essay this afternoon, and this was a stern and welcome corrective to my lassitude. Right, none of us will be this alive again. Help the unhappy. Right.

By: koreanish

koreanish — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 19:33:42 +0000

Oh, know that I don’t doubt mediocrity is everywhere. And that it always has been. But I do feel like narrative in general is being undermined, whether it is in journalism, nonfiction writing, fiction or film or television. And with that, the ability to reach for insight. As well as the appetite for it.

By: hiddenconnections

hiddenconnections — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 17:36:20 +0000

As a snobby classicist this definitely resonates with me, but the thing to keep in mind is that mediocrity is always everywhere, and the lame essayists who surrounded Seneca or Samuel Johnson have all completely vanished, even though at the time their fashionable style of writing must have been just as present as equally weak and fashionable writing styles are today–proportionally-speaking, of course.

The essays of Borges are truly exquisite, as well, if you’re looking for good essay-writing–and the stuff in the New Yorker is rigidly homogeneous, but of a very talented species of homogeneity.

In many ways it also seems as if modern writers are afraid to express themselves, timidly holding everything back lest they be exposed to ridicule–an inevitable product of success–but this was also no doubt true in the past. What we need is perspective! Greater perspective would really help to draw stronger conclusions, to delineate these lineaments, as it were.