Friday, September 1, 2006

Hesse, "Saving a Place for Essayistic Literacy"

Hesse, Doug. "Saving a Place for Essayistic Literacy." Passions, Pedagogies, and 21st Century Technologies. Eds. Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe. Urbana, Ill.: NCTE, 1999. 34-48.

Considering then-formidable digital avenues, such as home pages and listservs, Hesse issues a preservationist argument for the essay. The provisional, self-reflective, scrap-collecting models of essayism, though historically abundant, have yielded to "essay" as an institutional staple--a commonplace for "writing practices characterized by texts of a certain length, complexity, and expected integrity" (34). Hesse proceeds along two stases, definition and value (i.e., what is an essay or what is essayism? how valuable is it in light of shifting writing practices online?).

Hesse points specifically to anti-essayistic traces in Bolter (Writing Space) and Lanham (The Electronic Word). Bolter, Hesse contends, focuses his study of hypertext too much on full-text hypertexts, like Jocye's "Afternoon" (40). "Bolter and Lanham imagined a reading and writing world of glosses, in which readers interactively modified and constructed texts by direct reference. In fact, the Web evolves by accretion, not substitution or critique" (40).

"Within the academy the term 'essay' has evolved into a generic term for all works of prose nonfiction short enough to be read in a single sitting. But the genre's history and the qualities of its defining texts make clear that essays are a specific kind of nonfiction, one defined in opposition to more formal and explicitly conventional genres--the scientific article or report, for example, or the history, or the philosophical argument" (36).

"The rhetoric of the essay depends on consoling the reader that the world can be made abundantly complex and strange and yet still be shown as yielding to ordering, if not order" (37).

"Some of the very qualities associated with literacy online--specifically, movement and exploration in a method more provisional and contextual than methodical--have been true of the essay since its inception" (40).

"There is an important value to reading and writing extended, connected texts whose authors manage the double pulls of complexity and order, producing works that convey their status as products of a certain experiential and intellectual nexus, not as objective truth" (47).

^Clearly written before the popularization of weblogs (41d).

Posted by Derek Mueller at September 1, 2006 12:34 PM to Writing Technologies