 So, it's my pleasure to introduce three Stanford colleagues for today's panel on the value of the essay in the 21st century. We met beforehand and determined that it would be probably more useful for the panel as a whole if rather than each speaker presenting a very synthetic account of how he or she views the essay, that each one will focus on one aspect of the essay that has been part of the genre in the past, 19th century, 18th century, 20th century, and see if there is any future for that particular dimension of the essay in the 21st century. It's therefore I will not take up too much time now in order to leave as much time as possible for the Q&A and begin with an introduction of my colleague Nick Jenkins who teaches modern poetry at Stanford in the English department. And he's the author of a forthcoming book on W. H. Auden called The Island, W. H. Auden and the Regeneration of England. And he's also an essayist having written for The New Yorker and the Yale Review and the TLS, Raritan, he also blogs and tweets, I'm sure we'll discuss whether that constitutes any form of essayism. And so Nick, I think I'll ask you to speak and then I'll introduce each speaker as that speaker takes the microphone. Okay, thank you, Robert, very much, and thank you all for coming. I'm delighted to be here. So section one of what I guess is going to be a collective essay on the essay between the three of us. Section one is entitled Experiment. The question mark, punctuation's only visually unstable asymmetric sign, typography's bare hook, looking for edifying substance to sink itself into, is the heraldic emblem of the essay form. Emerson, a great essayist, wrote that Montaigne, the father of the essay, had a medal made, which he wore around his neck. Over his name, this is Emerson talking, he drew a pair of scales and wrote cursé-jeux, what do I know, under it. The first version of Montaigne's accumulated questionings entitled Essays was published in 1580. Less than two decades later in 1597, Francis Bacon, proud of saying that his method as a natural scientist was to put nature to the question, published his own essays. The first time the word has been used in English to describe that literary genre. In both French and English, the word's root concerns a trial, an attempt, a test, an experimenting, a questioning, in other words. What Montaigne and Bacon, when Montaigne and Bacon used the word, the term itself was an experimental one. Novel, idiosyncratic, unconventional, questionable. A question is an attempt to grasp at the unknown. These ideas about questions imply that the essay must, to maintain its essence, venture into unknown terrain. That it must contain something provisional tentative. To write an essay about something one is a master of or feel certain about, would almost be a contradiction in terms. The essay, at least the essay in its Western guise then, must be experimental. What kind of experimentation is implied? I don't think it can be a formal kind of experiment. That seems almost irrelevant. Essays are often short, but many of the most famous ones have been long. Locs, an essay concerning human understanding. Malthus is an essay on the principle of population. Nor does an essay have to be in prose. Many poems have been called essays from Pope's essay on man to Carl Shapiro's essay on rhyme. It could be in an auditory form, Samuel Barber wrote a set of essays for orchestra. It could be visual. For example, we talk easily about a photographic essay. No, the essaying in the essay has nothing to do with its formal or generic properties. Nor does it have to do, in my opinion, with a particular traditional cultural context, to work in a periodical or a book. Print is not of the essence of the essay. It's clear today that many people write essays that exist only in the virtual space of the web. An essay indeed could be written on the desert sands or projected as a hologram in the sky. Instead, the counter spirit that is intrinsic to the essay form, the questioning of the given, of the conventional, of the known, has to be stylistic and thematic above all. It has to be an abandoning of whatever one is supposed to know about. I'll give you an example from my own writing. I'm a poetry scholar and literary historian. But here are a few snippets from something that I would call an essay that I wrote taking me onto what felt like some new terrain. This essay was about Frederick Holmes, a wealthy brewer born in Maidstone in 1850. And his wife Florence, in the events that the essay is concerned with, took place in 1908. This is a tale from deep in the golden years of Edwardian England when the British Empire was at its zenith. 1908, when the events that I am about to mention occurred, was the year of Bittrick's Potters, the testing of Jemima puddle duck, E.M. Forsters of Room with a View, Kenneth Graham's The Wind in the Willows. February 1908 opened very badly. Frederick, Frederick Holmes, came back from London for the last time on the 5th of February, 1908. And Braxton drove him back to Henley. That was where his home was. They made the journey in complete silence. On Thursday afternoon, Frederick ran into his gardener at Crockmore. That's the house he lived at. But Barefield noticed nothing untoward about his employer's appearance. He seemed his usual rational self. That evening, though, William Mackenzie's son saw their neighbor. Roderick Mackenzie was disturbed by Frederick's appearance and told his father's friend that he looked awfully seedy. In spite of Frederick's illnesses, Frederick and his wife Florence shared the same bed as usual that Friday night. With Frederick's sufferings, it must have been hard for anybody to sleep. Eventually, though, Florence, at least, did drop off. At some point in the night, probably between 4 and 5 a.m., Frederick got up from his wife's side and dressed himself. Then, in the bedroom, with Florence slumbering only a few feet away, he loaded six bullets into his Webley pistol. A cartridge and handgun combination, so an advert from the time runs, with a relatively mild recoil, but with good penetration and excellent stopping power. He probably owned the Mark IV version of the Webley, popularly known as the Boer War model, because so many British Army officers had purchased them before shipping out for Africa in 1899. In the bedroom, in the still physically competent hands of an utterly deranged man, the pistol's loaded cylinder clicked back into place. Having loaded the Webley on the early morning of the 8th of February, 1908, Frederick Holmes first came up to his wife Florence and shot her twice, once in the right temple and once in the right side of the torso near her shoulder blade. One bullet entered her brain, the other her heart. She'd remained unaware of his stealthy approach and she died instantaneously. When her body was found in the morning, she looked at first as if she were merely peacefully asleep in her own bed. Having killed his wife, Frederick straightened the bed clothes a bit, perhaps replaced a pillow, and then closed the door to the bedroom gently behind him. Frederick went next to his daughter Winifred's bedroom, where she too was asleep. Again, he quietly approached his sleeping target. He shot his daughter under the right eye. She too died without awakening. Frederick once more quietly closed the door of the bedroom. He had just been in, as though he were only a solicitous Edwardian patriarch doing a cautionary round, making sure that all was well with each of his female charges and then leaving them to rest. For one last time, Frederick Holmes, though in one sense out of his mind, was in another completely in control of his world. At some point after these events had unfolded, Frederick re-entered his and his dead wife's bedroom, where he ejected the spent cartridges and replenished his pistol at the dressing table. Having used five bullets, he now loaded five fresh ones into the gun cylinder, filling it to capacity again. Then he descended the stairs of his darkened house and as if leaving the bodies behind, walked out into the brisk early morning air. As he did, he must have heard the birds singing in the sun coming up over the glinting, duet meadows. But for Lee, the town where this takes place, would by now have felt to Frederick like one of the dark places of the earth. After all, by his actions, he had made it so. What's the end of the extract? I'm gonna read from my essay. I started off there with a list of books, Beatrix Potters, The Testing of Jemima, Puddle Duck, Kenneth Graham's, The Wind and the Willows and so on. That was me on my home ground, so to speak, fussing about publication dates and literary history. I didn't really know where I was gonna go after that, but somehow, without a tool realizing that this is what would happen, I ended up in my essay on different terrain altogether. In the bedroom of Frederick and Florence Holmes, two people who happened to have been my great-great-grandparents. I suppose my essay, like almost every other, is asking, what happened and why did it happen? I suppose if it were to be extended, then the next question that an essay would inexorably have to face would be, what do I feel about it? But on that subject, what do I know? Thank you, Nick. I'm sure we'll have occasion in the question and answer to talk about the interesting tension that was set up. I'm presuming deliberately between kind of meditation on the essay and then this dramatic shift of genre into a kind of narrative, this kind of storytelling. Is the essay broad enough as a genre to accommodate storytelling within its parameters? And I'm assuming that Nick is going to have a very strong commitment to the affirmative in that regard. My next colleague from Stanford who will be speaking to us today is Andrea Lunsford, a professor at Stanford, a distinguished chaired professor. Unfortunately, I lost on my way over the little brief bio that she sent me so. But I don't remember the name of your chair, Andrea, but I do know that you have published some 12 books and that your field of specialization, among others, and your interest in this topic today has to do with multimedia. And I believe that you're going to talk to us about the essay and the new media that... Yes, indeed. Thank you, Robert. We're exposed to. I have a handout. I only got 25 copy hands here. Nick, on the way up here, that the first talk I ever gave at the MLA when I was still a graduate student, the first question after the panel was for me and the question was, do you have a handout? And I was, I didn't have one. But I never go anywhere now without a handout, you can be sure. So this is my little handout for today. And I would just begin by thanking Nick for those wonderful thoughts about the essay and especially for the piece of his essay that he read. I wanted to say a little bit about how voice works in the essay and in addition to the characteristics that Nick pointed out, the experiential part of essays, the novel, the questionable and so forth, I think that in the best essays, the voice is always somewhat intimate but not sentimental or overly intimate. It's always very close to you telling, it's like someone's speaking right in your ear. It's that kind of personalized but not personal, in other words, not full of disclosure of that kind. But nevertheless, some kind of intimate bond between the reader and the writer, which I think is a characteristic of the best essays. But what I wanted to talk a little bit today is about the effect that media has had is having, media have had on the essay and on potentials for essay. So if I had to describe, I had to say today what I think is the most exciting about the work that's going on in the genres of essay. I would say, first of all, that the essays now that I admire most are dialogic. They're not monologic. There's a conversation going on within the essay. Now, that's characteristic of Nick's essay. It's characteristic of some of the earlier ones that he mentioned. But I think that kind of dialogism, kind of botanian notion of dialogism is much more possible today because of technology, because of electronic literacy than it has been in the past. Second, I think that essays today are highly visual. And Nick, I would say Nick's, the excerpt from his essay that he read is visual. It's ecstatic. He's painting the pictures with words for us. We're seeing that bedroom. We're seeing that pistol. We're seeing what happens, but that those images are created with words very effectively. In the essay today, we can use words, but we have many other things at our disposal. We can use all kinds of art. We can do our own art or we can import art. And Nick mentioned, we can have entire visual essays. We can have entire video essays that are all images. Thirdly, I would say that essays today are aural and oral. They are full of voices that we can hear. And I had a student last year who turned in an essay to me on a disc, and I slipped it into my computer and pulled it up, and it was an essay. It was about 18 or 20 pages long. It was very beautifully written, and it was about cinema. And all I had to do was click when I came to the various passages to hear the voices. He'd have to describe the voices to me. I could actually hear them. At Stanford, we were given, about two years ago, the Hoover Archives was given the entire collection of Commonwealth Club speeches. And they're available now in digital form. I think we got a grant from the NEH to digitize all those speeches from the whole Commonwealth Club. And to have that material available to create essays with, imagine that, the tools that are at our hands. And finally, I would say that the fourth characteristic I'm particularly interested in of essays today is their multi-vocality, that again, the bringing in of multiple voices, not just one and even not just two in a dialogue, but multiple voices. Essays today take forms, a documentary can be an essay, I think, and Nick mentioned that kind of essay as well. We can have photographic essays, and we can especially have audio essays. And I forgot to put this on the little handout, but in case you would like to check out some wonderful audio essays done by Stanford students and their colleagues, go to the web and just put in storytelling.stanford.edu. And that will take you to the Stanford Storytelling Project site, which is an active site. The essays are aired every week on KCSU and the same station where Robert has his show. And the young people work very, very hard creating these essays for the ear. So we listen to them, and it's quite a different set of constraints to create an oral essay one to be listened to. There's the 15-second rule, for instance, that you better do something different within 15 seconds or you lose your audience in an audio essay. So I've given you some examples from writing to try to suggest these characteristics. The first one is from an essay written a little bit before the 21st century, but still such a very good example, Susan Griffin's Red Shoes from her book, The Arrows of Everyday Life. It's a gorgeous, gorgeous essay that goes back and forth between her voice and a meditation that invokes her grandmother. All of the grandmother passages are in italics. All of Susan Griffin's are in regular print. And it's a very, it's a long essay, and the momentum that it creates by shifting between those fonts is really amazing and the different voices that it's able to capture. The second one is a piece from Jonathan Saffron 4 called A Primer for the Punctuation of Heart Disease. And it is an entire essay about punctuation marks. Nick opened with the question mark. My favorite punctuation mark is the upside down, semicolon, which was used for several hundred years, a kind of a halfway between a semicolon and a period upside down, semicolon. But Jonathan 4 has created all these punctuation marks that he says characterize his family's discourse. So that little box is the silence mark. And he has these conversations where he puts the silence mark in. The willed silence mark is a box all colored in so that it's all black. And then he has the insistent question mark, which is a double bolded question mark. And then he gives a little conversation with his mother. Are you dating at all? Box. But you're seeing people, I'm sure, right? Another box. I don't get it. Are you ashamed of the girl? Are you ashamed of me? Blacked in box, double question mark. So that goes on for an entire essay describing the persistence of heart disease in his family. And yeah, there's a spiderweb. I won't tell you all the punctuation marks, but you have to go and look at them. Then I've given you a third example, which is from one of my students' essays. It's an essay, a sophomore student wrote this, an essay, it's a meditation on sound, how sound works in graphic narratives. And he's arguing that it's a different kind of sound from either film where you actually hear the sounds or writing where you have the sounds described in words. And the last one is a blog. And I don't need to say any more about that. Everybody is blogging. Some of them I would characterize as essays and some of them I would not. This one is Stanley Fish, who writes incessantly in The New York Times that whatever's on his mind. And the excerpt that I've given you from the blog here, there were 619 responses to Stanley's little essay and that those 619 responses evoked another essay from Fish and that then evoked a third one. So I think the whole area of blogs is going to change our understanding of the participatory nature of essays, become a participatory form. So I'll stop there and thank you very much. Thank you very much, Andrea, thank you very much. Our next speaker is my colleague in my own department of French and Italian at Stanford, Dan Nettlestien. He has just come out with a book called The Terror of Natural Right, which is about the French Revolution and the Enlightenment from University of Chicago Press and he's going to speak to us today about a third aspect of the essay. So I thought I'd address the question of the means an essay has at its disposal to make its case, what are the powers of argumentation for an essay and in the spirit of the essay, a spirit of undisciplined and uncharted reflections, I thought I would come without preparing my talk. But rest assured I'm a professional, at least a professor, which means that I get paid to sound convincing even when I don't know what I'm talking about, which actually leads me to my first point, namely that often it is the identity of the author, which is just as important in arguing or in persuading through an essay as it is the arguments that the author puts forward. Paul Krugman doesn't need to shower us with statistics in order to persuade us that his economic analysis is better than ours. And the importance of being the right kind of author was impressed on me when I wrote an op-ed to decrying the abuse of the term socialism and political discourse, only to have someone comment, well what could a French professor possibly know about this topic? Of all useless professions. Now you don't actually have to be the right kind of author to be a persuasive essayist. Our colleague at Stanford, Denise Gigante, just edited a great collection of English essays from the 18th and 19th century and in her introduction makes the point that one of the salient features of all these essays is how they produce a persona. They create a fictional author whom we learn to trust and that this is really a key aspect of being a persuasive essayist. It's a bit like what Andrew was talking about in terms of voice in order to convey authority. So that would be my first point that slightly cynically to persuade in an essay also depends on the either real or fictional identity that of the essayist. Now fortunately there is a democratizing tendency that counterbalances this aristocracy of authorship and that is the power of rhetoric. Indeed one of I think the key distinctions between say an essay and a scholarly article is that the essay does not necessarily have to demonstrate and merely has to persuade. Even if you're not Paul Krugman you don't really need pie charts and graphics and statistics to get your point across but you can rely on good arguments of course but also stylistic effects. I think that it's interesting for academics to reflect on the essay because you really have to you can't be a bad writer if you wanna be a good essayist whereas I think you could probably make the point as an academic you can get by on so so writing. This means also that the good essayist has to have a whole slew of rhetorical tricks up his or her sleeve and this can go from the artfully crafted slogan to even sophomoric gags like pretending you came without having prepared your talk when you spent all night rehearsing your impromptu remarks. So now I can pretend that I stopped the joke. So turning now to the topic advertised in the title of our panel namely the virtues of the essay. I think that the most persuasive uses of essays are precisely for questions that can't be factually determined. Questions where pie charts don't actually do you much help anyway. I find this interesting that it's even true in academia. If you go back in almost any humanistic discipline you'll find an essay that had an incredible influence in shaping the scholarship for the next 20 years and sometimes you go back and read these essays and think what were people thinking? This does not prove its point at all and nonetheless often it is essays like this that are much more influential than weighty tomes that are a thousand pages long. Now I'd like to raise two final remarks regarding this surprising and sometimes unfounded influence of essays. Because while I do believe the essays feel a very important niche both inside and outside of the ivory tower I think they also exhibit some of the more crafty traits of all rhetorical genres. Precisely because essayists do not need to support their arguments with the foundation of footnotes they sometimes can play a little fast and loose with the truth. For instance there's this really annoying tick among French essayists where instead of citing an author they'll just say as Jean-Paul Sartre writes somewhere and then they'll go on to give you like a mangled and possibly even invented quote that you have no way of checking whether or not this is true. So there's a sort of lower standard of evidence that seems to be in place for essays. But I will conclude on a slightly happier prediction which is that I share Andrea's sense of excitement about what the internet offers for the future of the essay in the 21st century because obviously it's a great support for essays but I also think that it offers new ways of incorporating evidence and references without fundamentally disturbing the genre. And here I'm thinking of something just as simple as the hyperlink. There are very elegant ways of inserting references without having to have the heavy armature of footnotes or bibliography that show that you are referencing to other bodies of knowledge without making a big fuss about it. And I think really good online essayists are the ones who we actually find amusing ways to cite giving a little editorializing in their hyperlink and this sort of makes the act of citation part of the essay itself. And so I think that there is a way perhaps even for academic scholarship as more and more of it is born digital to renew with some of the traditions of the essay and therefore the future for us as well. So I'll stop there, thanks. Thank you very much. So before we open it up to the audience for questions I'll make a few remarks that we'll maybe get our panelists to engage in dialogue with one another. I for one am a little bit skeptical about the genre of the essay in the way in which it gets championed oftentimes. I mean I understand that the essay is particularly modernistic in so far as it's saying things without presuming to know what the outcome of a certain line of investigation is. It militates against systems and especially in this regard theories like the Hegelian totalization of knowledge and his theory of history of absolute spirit. So many of the great ideas of the 19th century, the theories of the 19th century cannot be reduced to the concept of an essay either Darwinianism or Hegelianism, Marxism, psychoanalysis, these things are total systems. And I think that when we talk about essays one of the connotations of the word essay is that it's not presuming at this sort of exhaustive treatment of its topic. It is presuming to offer us a particular angle, a particular point of view. And here I would starting backwards ask Dan when he began his remarks by saying that in the spirit of the undisciplined nature of the essay there's another version of the essay that comes from people like Robert Musil and even Adorno, which considered the essay precisely the most exact form of the investigation of a particular phenomenon because it can focus in on the devil of the detail. Whereas the grand systems, Allah, Marx or the Hegel things, they're so concerned with the totality that oftentimes the particularities of the facts get overlooked and the privilege of the essays to be able to zero in in a very delimited sphere and pursue a certain kind of precision about what one is talking about. So that's one question we can throw out. Regarding the multi-vocality and the remarks of Andrea I would say that I'm in a certain sense all for it. However, at what point does our understanding of the genre of the essay become so blurred at its boundaries that it starts losing its specificity altogether if one is quick to divorce the genre from what I would call the univocicity of it. In other words, this is where Dan's question about the author of the essay is crucial because I personally would like to be persuaded a little bit more that an essay can exist independently of its genetic link to a singular voice, a single voice that is the voice of authority of the essay. And insofar as it stages itself as only one voice presumes a certain kind of modesty and not a totality, therefore it's not metaphysics, it's an essay. Hence the long association of the genre of the essay with the personal confession. And in this spirit also for Nick would be the way in which a kind of personal reconstruction of something that happened in your own ancestry. At a certain point there was a shift in the register of your thing where it becomes novelistic rather than essayistic. And do you think that the boundaries of the genre are so fluid that one could actually turn the essay into a more traditional form of storytelling and still remain essayistic? So these are some of the questions that came to me as I was listening to our speakers. So maybe I'll ask them to say a few words and then we'll open it up to you. Well, I'll be brief. I don't really think we live in the age of totalizing knowledge anymore. No, we don't. And I think when you go to the bookstore and look what most books are written on, they're not the big panoramas, but on the contrary, there, I mean especially scholarly books, yours excluded of course, are mostly on really small questions. I mean I just wrote a book that basically deals with 12 months in the history of the French Revolution. And it feels that in a way today perhaps and it could be that the essay obviously evolves in relation to the other genres that are available. But I feel like today it's almost only in the essay that you can once again turn back to the bigger questions and address not just the details but the larger stakes as well. But you don't think the essay puts a particular burden on the essayist to be precise about what he or she is talking about. In other words, this question of the undisciplined nature is what I wanted to get to. Well, I think you can be precise but you can also get away with more. There's fewer controls on the essayist. And that's what's so annoying about political essays, especially when they're written by people you don't agree with. That's not true, but they just go on to their next claim. Yeah, I know. That's exactly what I've always found frustrating about a certain kind of essay is that you, because it doesn't presume to exhaust, you can get away with a partial statement that doesn't have to be held to the same standards of verifiability. These Stanley fish blogs are masterpieces of that. You know what's left out. So I'll just say that what Robert's touched on to me, the difference between fiction and nonfiction or between a short story and an essay, those lines are very, very difficult to draw today, I think. And the popularity of creative nonfiction and essays that fall within that category, there's a big debate within the field of writing itself about what kind of a contract the author should have with readers about veracity, for instance. Well, all those cases, well, who were that million little pieces guy and the people who are the Holocaust survivor who really was not and so forth. It really irritates people when you put something forward as an essay or a memoir and it turns out to be complete fiction. On the other hand, I think there are short stories that I absolutely think are essays that I would just argue to the death that this is an essay and not a short story. So. I guess I'll make a couple of points. First of all, I think that, you know, there are clear traditions of the essay and the essay, the kind of essay that you invoked, Robert, was an essay that really emerges from a philosophical tradition in Europe and your examples were of novelists or theoreticians from Europe who were writing a kind of philosophical probing of a particular idea. In the Anglo-American context, particularly in the Anglo context, the essay has always been more extravagant, divergatory, I mean, think of the titles of a lot of those early essay periodicals, the Rambler, the Eidler, the Spectator, the Tatler. The essay in the context in which I think a lot of people who write in English find themselves is a context in which that kind of totalizing, even micro-totalizing, which is, I guess, what Adorno and Musil are trying to do, is hostile to the spirit of the essay as they understand it. Second thing I'd say, you know, a little bit contentiously just to come back to you in your challenge to me about whether the novelistic can really be subsumed into the essayistic is that it's my sense that something that too clearly falls within the traditional parameters of what we abstractly imagine the essay to be is not really true to the deep essayistic spirit. Well, one just brief response to that, and then we'll open it up to all of you, is that speaking personally, I feel that the novel as a genre is one that is so inexhaustible in its formal possibilities that it can easily subsume and incorporate the essay within it. In fact, we have one of our graduate students in my department is writing a very persuasive thesis about the essayistic novel or essayistic fiction. So the essay can fit within the larger framework of the novelistic. The question is, and I would still need to be persuaded is whether the novelistic can fit under the rubric of the essayistic and it would certainly be quite fascinating to consider how that would be done. But I think while the former has been done very successfully and has a proven track record, the latter may still yet have to show its full colors. May I invite? Yeah, go ahead. Present company accepted. Yes, of course. May I invite any of you who would like to come up to the microphone to engage in further dialogue with the panelists? Yes? Sure. Of a novelistic essay. Right, didn't you just? Of an essayistic novel? No, essayistic, yes. Yeah. Well, I can give you several examples. The first one that comes to mind is the famous novel by Robert Muziel, the Austrian writer The Man Without Qualities, which is a broad story about the Austro-Hungarian Empire right at the eve of the First World War. But so many of the chapters in that book are actually, you can extract them as essays. And I think Andrea said that there are so many stories which are actually essays, no? And so that would be one example. Another example are any series of certainly the European writers, which I know better than the Anglo writers, where there are whole sections in their novels. And I know this from our student, Christy Wampol, who's doing her dissertation on the essayistic fiction, that they can actually, the author of a novel has written essays and published essays under the guise of essays and transposes them wholesale into his novel. And they are now part of the fabric of the novel with an independent existence. And that author, for example, is Michel Tournier, the French author. And I think Borges, Calvino, these novels are quite essayistic. Yeah, but isn't that a case of the novel trying to redefine or make itself more porous generically? And the same thing happens in reverse, where the essay tries to make itself more porous and open to other kinds of writing. It's not that the novel is the limited experience or the kind of fundamental mandated form of the contemporary. Indeed, I think that the rise of nonfiction to enormous prominence and prestige is a sign of what you could say. And it's a book that I've often fantasized about writing to kind of complement our former Stanford colleague, Ian Watt, who wrote the rise of the novel. I'd love to write a book called The Fall of the Novel. And it seems to me that the tide of literary endeavors now flowing to periodize the novel as a particular form from a particular time and that the novel seeks its own new terrain, but every other kind of writing does as well. The novel does it by subsuming the essayistic. Maybe the essay does it by subsuming the novelistic or the visual to go back to what Andrea was saying. Everything tries to metamorphose into something else. Somebody in here may know. Michelle Cliff's work. I don't know which came first in a long essay called If I Could Write This in Fire, I Would Write It in Fire. And then her novel is called Abang, A-B-E-N-G. And they deal with the same material. Parts of them would be very interesting. That can be a homework assignment for all of us. We can go look up Michelle Cliff and find out what's the relationship of that long essay to the novel and which came first and how do they relate to one another. Do you have examples of short stories that you would argue are essays? Jonathan Saffron's fourth piece on Heart to Seize was In the New Yorker Under Fiction. I believe that it is an essay. So there's one example. I was trying to think last night, there's a, can you help me, Nick, the wonderful essay about boardwalk, the game Monopoly. Does anybody any of you know that essay? And it's laid out like the board itself. It's a very famous essay. But it, I have seen people debate. I have seen it listed in anthologies under short stories and under essays. So there are some things out there, some pieces out there that where those formal qualities really have been debated. And those would be too, I'm really, I'm having a senior moment about me. I don't remember that name. But if you write, if you email me, I will find it and it's Lunsford at Stanford. And then I guess you have novels that are also sort of commentaries on themselves too. Sort of somewhat along the same lines that Andrea is talking about. David Foster Wallace's work often has a lot of meta commentary in it where he writes in a pseudo scholarly way about the fiction that he's also writing. So, you know, I'm just hypothesizing that at the moment the pure form of any of these established genres can't really exist if it's to be true to the spirit that established the genre in the first place. So if I could interject, I mean, if you go back to one of the founding novels of French modernism, André Gide's Les Faux Manilleurs, you already find exactly that. There's the Journal of Edward, which is a meta commentary on the novel that you're reading. So I wouldn't be too quick to suggest that this is like a new development and that we can sort of read the future of either the novel or the essay in here. It could be, in a way, as Robert's been suggesting, maybe this was part of the novel all along. We'll be sure. Pale fire would be another example. Well, you could even go back and say that Montaigne has a very novelistic trait. I mean, not many of us would talk about the passage of a kidney stone in our essays anymore and graphic detail. Maybe we would, but it does give it a kind of novelistic quality. It's something to hope for. Kidney stones? No, no, no, not kidney stones. Being able to write about the passage of your kidney stones. Yes, please. Oh my God, I can't do it. Nick? Something by Nick. Oh. That's it. Yeah, I could say what mine is. It's an essay by Freud, A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis. Oh, that is what it is. You know, I'm not saying it's the greatest essay I've ever written or that it fulfills every criterion of what an essay should be, but to me, it's an enormously potent piece of writing that digs very deep into, you know, sort of the four last things in life. So that's my favorite essay. Yeah, Robert? Oh, I have so many, but one of the most recent is Ann Dillard has an essay called Seeing, which, I mean, I read that and there I admired the specific virtue of the essay as I understand it to be able to condense within 20 pages that which would take, you know, the treatise writer, hundreds of pages in order to argue in a more distended way and this kind of condensation is, and you know, some Freud's essays for sure, and Virginia Woolf has that beautiful essay on pencils or something. It's going out looking to buy a pencil. She's walking through the streets of London is another one of my favorites. Audrey and Rich has got some wonderful poet, of course, but she also has some really amazing essays and one, I think it's called what every young woman should know that I read over and over again and often teach to my students. Ann, do you? Well, I guess I'll make a plug for Multania. I think that I've been working on an article on liberal education and you know, you always read so many empty claims about the virtues of liberal education. So I went back to read Multania's on the education of children. It's essay number 26 in the first volume and it's by far the most amazing and convincing essay I've ever read on the purpose of education. Someone else had a hand up, yeah, please. My question is the blurriness between different genre, but then why talk about a pure essay? When someone is in a class and when you're working with students or you sit down and write something, what is the advantage, what's the value of thinking of this particular form? Yes, it does. But you're gonna get four, I'm sure you're gonna get four different answers. I'm sure represent one fringe, far fringe, which is that I'm a classicist in the sense that I am all for genres retaining their essential formalistic definitions and that I, for one, would resist contaminating the essay with too many other genres, be it the novelistic, the confessional, the editorial and the scientific article and I would prefer the essay to be that essentialistic kind of condensed meditation from one point of view on one particular topic with a personalized voice in it but that's my kind of conservativism vis-a-vis the essay and it sounds to me like it's only my own product. Well, it makes perfect sense. It's just that I think that in the way that we have been talking about the essay as something that people are trying to blur is to misunderstand the phenomenon really because what you start off with is a piece of writing that you want to bring into being while you're actually at the keyboard and so you don't, I think, start out to write a kind of groovy, blurry essay or a chased, austere, chiseled, pure essay. It's that things turn out the way they do and that it seems to me that for a lot of people it's harder for them to produce something that's authentic to their ambition now that was kind of clearly recognizable as Robert very beautifully described it, this condensed, lucid, systematized reflection on a single subject. It's not that people start out to spit in the dip but that something has happened and as one of my favorite lines from the poet, John Ashbury says, you can't say it that way anymore. We have one minute. Go ahead. No, let, yes you go ahead. I have a question I want you to demonstrate but to persuade and I think demonstrating would be more artful writing. How do we hold each other accountable for misinformation addressed as a readers as a readership and say it's not okay to give partial statements? That's a great question. I think that explains the hundreds of responses to Stanley Fish's musings. Well I think this is again what makes the internet kind of exciting because when you read it in the paper or in a book you can throw the book against the wall but that's about the limit of your engagement or you can send a fiery letter off to the press but at least in a more interactive environment you can write back and I mean it's quite exciting now when you do publish online and there are comments to see what people say and to see how they call you out and sometimes make ridiculous statements but there at least we have a voice as readers too. Well I think that does it. We're at the end of our time I believe so I'd like to thank you all for being here and listening thank you very much. I wanna thank the Stanford Humanities Center for sending us these fantastic writers to listen to. Please stick around in just a few minutes we're going to do our final panel of the day which is about adapting writing for other media if you're curious about turning books into movies or and vice versa stick around thanks.