A lot of the reading we are doing for my course in Literary Theory & Criticism is based on essays written hundreds (if not thousands) of years ago… some from books, some from manifestos, others from lectures, but almost all of them are, at their beating hearts, just essays.
I shudder to think that somebody will unearth one of my many academic essays and publish it at any point. I don’t think they’re bad, for the record, but they’re certainly unworthy of celebration or study. I don’t have a lot of original academic thoughts, honestly… although I did quite well with my last essay for this class (discussing Barthes’ “Death of the Author” and using it to analyze Shakespeare).
As an aside: I apparently struggle to differentiate “because” and “as” in essays. “This theory does this thing, as we have studied this other thing…” Gotta watch that in the future!
Anyway, I’ve never read an essay that really “spoke” to me, although I have enjoyed a few of the readings we’re doing. I just finished Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”, and while I wouldn’t say I enjoyed it, I did find it interesting. Tragic that he wasn’t able to produce more analysis (Benjamin, that is… I also have to be a bit more careful about ambiguous pronouns in the sense that they don’t tie to a specific noun). I’m glad I read it… unlike that awful essay by Althusser that only made me angry. Very, very angry.
Anyway. The revision course I took was nice, although not focused enough on the actual process of revision, but that might just be what I wanted out of it. I still really appreciated the course and the instructor did a great job! Oh, I think I mentioned that I would link it… the company is called Writespace, and I think this is a link to their course offerings. They’re based out of Houston, but I attended digitally from Ontario, so I imagine that’s not a big problem these days… but do be aware of timezone issues, since it was a bit of a surprise that the course I signed up for wasn’t listed in my local timezone. Big fan of the course I took!
Hope everyone out there is staying safe and healthy!