Concept
Essay
Overview
An essay (, ESS-ay) is, generally, a piece of writing that gives the author's own argument, but the definition is vague, overlapping with those of a letter, a paper, an article, a pamphlet, and a short story. Essays have been sub-classified as formal and informal: formal essays are characterized by "serious purpose, dignity, logical organization, length," whereas the informal essay is characterized by "the personal element (self-revelation, individual tastes and experiences, confidential manner), humor, graceful style, rambling structure, unconventionality or novelty of theme," etc.
Essays are commonly used as literary criticism, political manifestos, learned arguments, observations of daily life, recollections, and reflections of the author. Almost all modern essays are written in prose, but works in verse have been dubbed essays (e.g., Alexander Pope's An Essay on Criticism and An Essay on Man). While brevity usually defines an essay, voluminous works like John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Thomas Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population are counterexamples.
In some countries, such as the United States and Canada, essays have become a major part of formal education. Secondary students are taught structured essay formats to improve their writing skills; admission essays are often used by universities in selecting applicants, and in the humanities and social sciences essays are often used as a way of assessing the performance of students during final exams.
The concept of an "essay" has been extended to other media beyond writing. A film essay is a movie that often incorporates documentary filmmaking styles and focuses more on the evolution of a theme or idea. A photographic essay covers a topic with a linked series of photographs that may have accompanying text or captions.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
In the original texts
Passages from public-domain books where Essay is discussed.
The Essay of _Death_ is obviously founded on Seneca’s Epistles on this subject. That he was well acquainted with Seneca’s _Letters_, is incontrovertible. He alludes to them thus in the dedication to Prince Henry, in 1612: “The word (Essays),” says he, “is late, but the thing is ancient; for Seneca’s Epistles to Lucilius, if you mark them well, are but Essays, that is, dispersed meditations, though conveyed in the…
Francis Bacon, Bacon's Essays, and Wisdom of the Ancients
names the idea; a chapter is titled for it; talks about the author, not by them; the book is about it; author linked in the graph; opens on it
Locke himself tells us that he uses the "plain historical method." We do not have to resort to the forcing of language to learn that this word "historical" contains the key to his work. Every page of the Essay is testimony to the fact that Locke always proceeds by inquiring into the way and circumstances by which knowledge of the subject under consideration came into existence and into the conditions by which it was…
John Dewey, Leibniz's New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding
states what it is; names the idea; the book is about it; opens on it
Empirical logics, those conceived under the influence of Mill, still existed, but their light was dimmed by the radiance of the regnant idealism. Moreover, from the standpoint of the doctrine expounded in the essays, the empirical logic committed the same logical fault as did the idealistic, in taking sense-data to be primitive (instead of being resolutions of the _things_ of prior experiences into elements for the…
John Dewey, Essays in Experimental Logic
names the idea; the book is about it; opens on it
PHYSICAL REALITY: 14, 22, 32, 124 ff., 139 ff., 149 ff., 154, 211 ff., 229, 235. PITKIN, W. B.: 241 ff. PRAGMATISM: iv, x, xi-xii, 11, 72, 97 ff., 156, 159, 176, 242, 261. PSYCHOLOGY: 206, 209 ff. PURE EXPERIENCE: 4, 23, 26-27, 35, Essay II, 74, 90, 93 ff., 96. 121, 123, 134, 135, 138, 139, 160, 193, 200, 226 ff., 257. RADICAL EMPIRICISM: iv-v, vii, ix-xiii, 41 ff., 47, 48, 69, 76, 89, 91, 107, 109, 121, 148, 156…
William James, Essays in Radical Empiricism
names the idea; the book is about it; opens on it
THE EPISTLE TO THE READER ESSAY CONCERNING HUMANE UNDERSTANDING. BOOK I NEITHER PRINCIPLES NOR IDEAS ARE INNATE CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION. CHAPTER II. NO INNATE SPECULATIVE PRINCIPLES. CHAPTER III. NO INNATE PRACTICAL PRINCIPLES CHAPTER IV.
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding, Volume 1
the book is about it; author linked in the graph; opens on it; names the idea
Philosophers who discussed Essay
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- Roland Barthes
- George Santayana
- Intellectual
- Walter Benjamin
- Paul Valéry
- Short story
- Voltaire
- Tzvetan Todorov
- Alain (philosopher)
- Hermann von Keyserling
- Henri Wald
Related ideas
- Edmund Burke
- Francis Bacon
- Analysis
- Thomas Carlyle
- Argument
- Philosophy
- An Essay Concerning Human Understanding
- Jesuits
- Literal and figurative language
- John Locke
- Joseph Addison
- Essays (Montaigne)
- Robert Burton
- Language
- Fiction
- Plagiarism
- Imperative mood
- Metaphor
- Manifesto
- Oxford English Dictionary
- Poetry
- Novel
- Plutarch
- Bertolt Brecht
Place in the tradition
Part of Absurdism.