| dc.description.abstract | The thesis/support form dominating college composition instruction is inadequate from developmental, epistemological, ideological, and feminist rhetorical perspectives. These theoretical and pedagogical deficiencies can be addressed through the use of the essay, but we must first rehabilitate our notions of the form by (re)turning to the earliest conception and practice of the genre. Tracing the origins of the essay, we arrive at three generalizations about its nature: it is an epistemologically skeptical quest for new visions of the truth in an uncertain universe and world in flux; it is anti-scholastic, transgressing disciplinary and discursive boundaries in an attempt to more fully address whole human problems; it rejects traditional rhetorical norms, operating instead according to the different, but no less rigorous, strictures of what we can call chrono-logic, the logic that orders and links thoughts associatively over time. These three fundamental qualities of the form are examined in the works of Montaigne and the early English essayists, especially Sir William Cornwallis, and then explicated as essential aspects of the twentieth-century theories of the essay espoused by Georg Lukacs, T. W. Adorno, Aldous Huxley, W. Wolfgang Holdheim, and Graham Good. Next, using the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, the essay is shown to be the embodiment of centrifugal, dialogic, "novelistic," and carnivalesque textual tendencies. Our rehabilitative theory of the essay is then tested against the practice of seven contemporary essayists: Aldous Huxley, Joan Didion, Charles Simic, Alice Walker, Scott Russell Sanders, Gretel Ehrlich, and Joseph Epstein. A discussion of how the essay was used in two composition classes follows, including an explanation of the assignment, preparatory exercises, model text, and prewriting activities created especially for this project, an examination of three resulting student essays, and a survey of student responses to working with the essay form. Finally, the essay is shown to be antithetical to the thesis/support form in a variety of ways; it thus serves as a corrective complement, a form that can help students achieve a critical perspective on the thesis/support form and thereby improve their performance in that genre. | |
