서울에서 책읽기 5: 에세이란

Robert Atwan (Foreword, BAE 07 에서):

Though nonfiction, these essays -- go back and read Annie Dillard's Teaching a Stone to Talk, for example -- clearly emerge from the same creative urgency as do short stories and poems.

Such essays have their founding father: Montaigne.... It was a leap of genius to turn customarily perceive flaws of composition into distinctive artistic features.... his intentionally casusal and modest term (simply meaning "attempt" or "trial") has since been applied to all sorts of prose works, some as magisterial as John Locke's philosophical tome Essay on Human Understanding and others as minuscule as Francis Bacon's aphoristic and very un-Montaignean gems. Prose may not even be a requirement.... Alexander Pope published in verse An Essay on Criticism.

David Foster Wallace (Introduction, BAE 07 에서):

I think I personally prefer the term 'literary nonfiction.'

I tend, as a reader, to prize and admire clarity, precision, plainness, lucidity, and the sort of magical compression that enriches instead of vitiates. Someone's ability to write this way, especially in nonfiction, fills me with envy and awe.

Robert Atwan (Foreword, BAE 03 에서):

Emerson wanted us to remain always wary od persuasive claims, to worry about the slippery slope between intellectual influence and intellectual tyranny.

... motto, taken from Emerson's address: "Life is our dictionay."

Anne Fadiman (Introduction, BAE 03 에서):

(Vagueness is the essayist's mortal enemy.).... I lked essays that were as clear as newly Windexed windowpanes, and if i couldn't understand something, out it went.