couverture

Essayism

Dillon, Brian

  • Éditeur : NYRB
  • 176 pages
  • ISBN 9781681372822
  • Paru le 18 septembre 2018
  • 24,95 $ *
  • Anglais

* Les prix de nos produits sont sujets à changements sans préavis.

Résumé

A compelling ode to the essay form and the great essaysists themselves, from Montaigne to Woolf to Sontag.

Quatrième de couverture

Essayism is a book about essays and essayists, a study of melancholy and depression, a love letter to belle-lettrists, and an account of the indispensable lifelines of reading and writing. Dillon's style incorporates diverse features of the essay: by turns agglomerative, associative, digressive, curious, passionate, and dispassionate, his is a branching book of possibilities, seeking consolation and direction from Montaigne, Woolf, Barthes, Adorno, Benjamin, Perec, Hardwick, and Sontag, to name just a few of his influences. Whether he is writing on origins, aphorisms, coherence, vulnerability, anxiety, or any other number of subjects, his command of language, his erudition, and his own personal history serve not so much to illuminate or magnify the subject as to discover it anew through a kaleidoscopic alignment of attention, thought, and feeling, a dazzling and momentary suspension of disparate elements, again and again.