þÿ<html> <head><title> Finding the limits of the Essay </title></head> <body background="/ms45/images/bgsclogo.jpg" text="#000000" leftmargin="5" topmargin="5"> <h1 align="center"> Finding the limits of the Essay </h1> <p align="justify"> What is essay? Many scientists asked this question to themselves and gave their versions.For example, in his famous dictionary Samuel Vohnson defined the essay as «a loose of sally of the mind» (A2>1>4=>5 ?CB5H5AB285 C<0). According to the Encyclopedia «Americana», «Essay is any relatively brief, literary composition on a restricted topic. » (-AA5- MB> >B=>A8B5;L=>5 :@0B:>5, ;8B5@0BC@=>5 A>G8=5=85, =0?8A0==>5 =0 >?@545;5==CN B5<C). For E.B. White, for example, «it s a ramble through the basement or the attic of the essayist s mind.» (-B> ?@>3C;:0 ?> ?>420;C 8;8 ?> G5@40:C C<0 ?8A0B5;O.).<br> </p><p align="justify"> Personally, I share the opinion belonging to Professor Galperin, who states: «The essay is a literary composition of moderate length on philosophical, social or literary subjects.» You know that the essays which are studied on school lessons are mostly informal essays. So my work is going to be about informal style. To draw a general idea to you I will give the main types of essay. There are two principle kinds of essays: formal and informal. Informal essays are brief, highly personal and individual statements (The cited work «Mr. Southey» «On natural death»). Formal essay are longer, tightly organized positions of personal opinions or attitudes on subjects (The cited work «The death of the moth»). It was once standard practice to make solemn classifications of the informal essay according to subject matter (People, Nature, Philosophical Reflections and so on). </p><p align="justify"> Still other categories were established by the prevailing tone, mood, method of presentation: serious, humorous, satirical, poetic, critical. We also distinguish moral, philosophical, literary and whatever else. </p><p align="justify"> Then, it should be noted that informal essay often employed the devices of fiction narration, description, dialogue. Thus, it turns into a series of types: the narrative essay, the descriptive essay, the argumentative essay and so forth. It is sometimes difficult to draw the line clearly between the informal essay and the straight autobiographical narrative, the sketch or the story. The personal essay often begins by relating a story or painting a world picture  or contains details which to all purposes do one or the other. </p> <h1 align="center"> History of the Essay </h1> <p align="justify"> Something very like the modern personal essay was written in antiquity, but the recent history of the form is brief. In the late sixteenth century, the French philosopher Montaigne became a writer of that he called «essais» brief . The first essayist in English, writing a few years after Montaigne but also in the sixteenth century, was the British statesman- scientist, Frances Bacon. The informal essay was throughout the seventeenth century a favorite form of the gentlemen writers- Sir William Temple, Abraham Cowley, Sir Thomas Browne, Ben Johnson, Isaac Wlton. In the eighteenth century the personal essay became a truly fashionable form. Daniel Defoe, Richard Steele, Joseph Addison, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Samuel Johnson- tried their hand at writing essays. The nineteenth- century audience, and especially the Victorian reader, was much attracted by the personal essay. The personal essay became for the first time truly «personal» , that is, autobiographical, lighter and more literary, less like a learned exercise. </p> <h1 align="center"> Structure and content. </h1> <br>(Example  The Cited work «On natural death» by Lewis Thomas. p.) <h2 align="center"> Structure </h2> <p align="justify"> Introduction (the subject or topic, problem, etc . Comments on the way it is to be treated). An important step in the process of writing an essay is the introduction. The introduction, especially the introductory paragraph, is important for a number of reasons. If it is clearly constructed, it will introduce the subject, perhaps with a definition and indicate the structure of the essay by giving an overview. </p><p align="justify"> Example.<br> «There are so many books about dying that there are now special shelves set aside for them in bookshops, along with the health-died and home-repair paperbacks and the sex manuals &(see p.7.)» </p><p align="justify"> Main part (analysis ,argument, reasoning and discussion ( advantages and disadvantages): <br> <ul><li> 1 main idea ( + examples, details); </li><li> 2 main idea ( + examples, details); </li><li> 3 etc </li></ul> </p><p align="justify"> In the main part the essay is supposed to have a visual design, and enough continuity that the reader will move from one through to the next smoothly and swiftly. Sequence starters (they are in bold type in the following text0 are also very important. e.g. : «First», «Then», «Next». «After this», «Finally». </p><p align="justify"> Example.<br> «An elm in our backyard caught the blight this summer and dropped stone dead, leafless, almost overnight. One weekend it was a normal-looking elm, maybe a little bare in spots but nothing alarming, and the next weekend it was gone, passed over, departed, taken &(see p.7.) » </p><p align="justify"> Conclusion (summary of the main points in Main Part. Own views/opinions and decisions). </p><p align="justify"> Drawing a conclusion involves making a summary of the main points already made. In addiction, one s own opinion or viewpoint may be added, if it is appropriate. A conclusion should always follow logically from what has been written before. <br> <pre> It can be concluded from & that & Therefore, it can be deduced that & Thus, inferred On this basis, From the table it can be estimated figure may calculated data seen information shown In conclusion, it can be said that & Finally, we can say </pre> </p><p align="justify"> Example.<br> «Pain is useful for avoidance, for getting away when there s time to get away, but when it is end game, and no way back, pain is likely to be turned off, and the mechanisms for this are wonderfully précis and quick. If I had to design an ecosystem in which creatures had to live off each other and in which dying was an indispensable part of living, I could not think of a better way to manage.(see p.8.)» </p> <h2 align="center"> Content. </h2> Sentences;<br> Paragraphs.<br> <h2 align="center"> The most characteristic language features of the Essay </h2> <p align="justify"> <OL type=1)> <LI>brevity of expression;</LI> <LI>the use of the first person singular;</LI> <LI>the abundant use of emotive words;</LI> <LI> the use of basic connectives: «and»- type adds ideas together; «or»- type is used to make an alternative proposal; «but»- type is used in arguments to consider the opposite or opposing view. </OL> <br> <u>«And»</u>- type connectives: <br> <pre> She passed therefore, she could take holiday. her examinations; as a result, accordingly, consequently, thus, </pre> <br> <u>«Or»</u>- type connectives: <br> <pre> Bob is slow In other words, he has difficulty at learning. To put it more simply, in learning It would be better to say, English. </pre> <br> <u>«But»</u>- type connectives: <br> <pre> Some of the exam However, we managed questions were very Nevertheless, to answer them difficult. Yet, satisfactorily. In spite of that, </pre> </p> <p align="justify"> In conclusion, more specifically, the essay may usually be identified by certain characteristics: <br> <ul><li> the personal element; </li><li> the suggestive treatment of the subject; </li><li> the informal structure; </li><li> the graceful and effortless style; </li><li> the literary effect. </li></ul> </p> <p align="justify"> These essential characteristics still survive and will continue to fond the essay, either in its traditional form or in mutations of them, a meaningful vehicle for the sane, calm grace of the literate mind. If the history of the essay teaches us anything, it is that the essay at its best reflects a civilized mind and will change without losing the essence of the genre. </p><p align="justify"> There are some examples of the essay for you to read. </p> <br> <h1 align="center"> THE CITED WORKS </h1> <br> <h2 align="center"> MR. SOUTHEY (by W. Hazlitt) </h2> <p align="justify"> Mr. Southey, as wel formerly remember to have seen him, had a hectic flush upon his cheek, a roving fire in his eye, a falcon glance, a look at once aspiring and dejected - it was the look that had been impressed upon his face by the events that marked the outset of his life, it was the dawn of Liberty that still tinged his cheek, a smile betwixt hope and sadness that still played upon his quivering lip. Mr. Southey's mind is essentially sanguine, even to over-weeningness. It is prophetic of good; it cordially embraces it; it casts a longing, lingering look after it, even when it is gone for ever. He cannot bear to give up the thought of happiness, his confidence in his fellow-man, when all else despair. It is the very element, "where he must live or have no life at all." While he supposed it possible that a better form of society could be introduced than any that had hitherto existed, while the light of the French Revolution beamed into his soul (and long after, it was seen reflected on his brow, like the light of setting suns on the peak of some high mountain, or lonely range of clouds, floating in purer ether!), while he had this hope, this faith in man left, he cherished it with child-like simplicity, he clung to it with the fondness of a lover, he was an enthusiast, a fanatic, a leveller; he stuck at nothing that he thought would banish all pain and misery from the world - in his impatience of the smallest error or injustice, he would have sacrificed himself and the existing generation (a holocaust) to his devotion to the right cause. But when he once believed, after many staggering doubts and painful struggles, that this was no longer possible, when his chimeras and golden dreams of human perfectibility vanished from him, he turned suddenly round, and maintained that "whatever is, is right." Mr. Southey has not fortitude of mind, has not patience to think that evil is inseparable from the nature of things. His irritable sense rejects the alternative altogether, as a weak stomach rejects the food that is distasteful to it. He hopes on against hope, he believes in all unbelief. He must either repose on actual or on imaginary good. He missed his way in Utopia, he has found it at Old Sarum  </p><p align="justify"> "His generous ardour no cold medium knows": his eagerness admits of no doubt or delay. He is ever in extremes, and ever in the wrong!. </p><p align="justify"> The reason is, that not truth, but self-opinion is the ruling principle of Mr. Southey's mind. The charm of novelty, the applause of the multitude, the sanction of power, the venerableness of antiquity, pique, resentment, the spirit of contradiction have a good deal to do with his preferences. His inquiries are partial and hasty: his conclusions raw and unconcocted, and with a considerable infusion of whim and humour and a monkish spleen. His opinions are like certain wines, warm and generous when new; but they will not keep, and soon turn flat or sour, for want of a stronger spirit of the understanding to give a body to them. He wooed Liberty as a youthful lower, but it was perhaps more as a mistress than a bride; and he has since wedded with an elderly and not very reputable lady, called Legitimacy. </p><p align="justify"> A willful man, according to the Scotch proverb, must have his way. If it were the cause to which he was sincerely attached, he would adhere to it through good report and evil report; but it is himself to whom he does homage, and would have others do so; and he therefore changes sides, rather than submit to apparent defeat or temporary mortification. Abstract principle has no rule but the understood distinction between right and wrong; the indulgence of vanity, of caprice, or prejudice, is regulated by the convenience or bias of the moment. </p> <p align="right"> (W. Hazlitt, "The Spirit of the Age; or Contemporary Portraits" <br> Paris 1825, vol. 1, pp. 81 -85) </p> <h1 align="center"> ON NATURAL DEATH (by Lewis Thomas) </h1> <p align="justify"> There are so many new books about dying that there are now special shelves set aside for them in bookshops, along with the health-diet and home-repair paperbacks and the sex manuals. Some of them are so packed with detailed information and step-by-step instructions for performing the function that you'd think this was a new sort of skill which all of us are now required to learn. The strongest impression the casual reader gets, leafing through, is that proper dying has become an extraordinary, even an exotic experience, something only the specially trained get to do. </p><p align="justify"> Also, you could be led to believe that we are the only creatures capable of the awareness of death, that when all the rest of nature is being cycled through dying, one generation after another, it is a different kind of process, done automatically and trivially, more "natural", as we say. </p><p align="justify"> An elm in our backyard caught the blight this summer and dropped stone dead, leafless, almost overnight. One weekened it was a normal-looking elm, maybe a little bare in spots but nothing alarming, and the next weekend it was gone, passed over, departed, taken. Taken is right, for the tree surgeon came by yesterday with his crew of young helpers and their cherry picker, and took it down branch by branch and carted it off in the back of a red truck, everyone singing. </p><p align="justify"> The dying of a field mouse, at the jaws of an amiable household cat, is a spectacle I have beheld many times. It used to make me wince. Early in life I gave up throwing sticks at the cat to make him drop the mouse, because the dropped mouse regularly went ahead and died anyway, but I always shouted unaffections at the cat to let him know the sort of animal he had become. Nature, I thought, was an abomination. </p><p align="justify"> Recently I've done some thinking about that mouse, and I wonder if his dying is necessarily all that different from the passing of our elm. The main difference, if there is one, would be in the matter of pain. I do not believe that an elm tree has pain receptors, and even so, the blight seems to me a relatively painless way to go even if there were nerve endings in a tree, which there are not. But the mouse dangling tail-down from the teeth of a gray cat is something else again, with pain beyond bearing, you'd think, all over his small body. </p><p align="justify"> There are now some plausible reasons for thinking it is not like that at all, and you can make up an entirely different story about the mouse and his dying if you like. At the instant of being trapped and penetrated by teeth, peptide hormones are released by cells in the hypothalamus and the pituitary gland; instantly these substances, called endorphins, are attached to the surface of other cells responsible for pain perception; the hormones have the pharmacologic properties of opium; there is no pain. Thus it is that the mouse seems always to dangle so languidly from the jaws, lies there so quietly when dropped, dies of his injuries without a struggle. If a mouse could shrug, he's shrug. </p><p align="justify"> I do not know if this is true or not, nor do I know how to prove it if it is true. Maybe if you could get in there quickly enough and administer naloxone, a specific morphine antagonist, you could turn off the endorphins and observe the restoration of pain, but this is not something I would care to do or see. I think I will leave it there, as a good guess about the dying of a cat-chewed mouse, perhaps about dying in general. </p><p align="justify"> Montaigne had a hunch about dying, based on his own close call in a riding accident. He was so badly injured as to be believed dead by his companions, and was carried home with lamentations, "all bloody, stained all over with the blood I had thrown up". He remembers the entire episode, despite having been "dead, for two full hours", with sonderment: </p><p align="justify"> It seemed to me that my life was hanging only by the tip of my lips. I closed my eyes in order, it seemed to me, to help push it out, and took pleasure in growing languid and letting myself go. It was an idea that was only floating on the surface of my soul, as delicate and feeble as all the rest, but in truth not only free from distress but mingled with that sweet feeling that people have who have let themselves slide into sleep. I believe that this is the same state in which people find themselves whom we see fainting in the agony of death, and I maintain that we pity them without cause... In order to get used to the idea of death, I find there is nothing like coming close to it. </p><p align="justify"> Later, in another essay, Montaigne returns to it: </p><p align="justify"> If you know not how to die, never trouble yourself; Nature will in a moment fully and sufficiently instruct you; she will exactly do that business for you; take you no care for it. </p><p align="justify"> The worst accident I've ever seen was in Okinawa, in the early days of the invasion, when a jeep ran into a troop carrier and was crushed nearly flat. Inside were two young MPs, trapped in bent steel, both mortally hurt, with only their heads and shoulders visible. We had a conversation while people with the right tools were prying them free. Sorry about the accident, they said. No, they said, they felt fine. Is everyone else okay, one of them said. Well, the other one said, no hurry now. And then they died. </p><p align="justify"> Pain is useful for avoidance, for getting away when there's time to get away, but when it is end game, and no way back, pain is likely to be turned off, and the mechanisms for this are wonderfully precise and quick. If I had to design an ecosystem in which creatures had to live off each other and in which dying was an indispensable part of living, I could not think of a better way to manage. </p><p align="right"> (Levis Thomas "On Natural Death", - in:<br> William Smart "Eight Modern Essayists,<br> New York, 1995, pp. 326-328) </p> <h1 align="center"> THE DEATH OF THE MOTH (by Wirginia Wolf) </h1> <p align="justify"> Moths that fly by day are not properly to be called moths; they do not excite that pleasant sense of dark autumn nights and ivy-blossom which the commonest yellow-underwing asleep in the shadow of the curtain never fails to rouse in us. They are hybrid creatures, neither gay like butterflies nor sombre like their own species. Nevertheless the present specimen, with his narrow hay-coloured wings, fringed with a tassel of the same colour, seemed to be content with life. It was a pleasant morning, mid-September, mild, benignant, yet with a keener breath than that of the summer months. The plough was already scoring the field opposite the window, and where the share had been, the earth was pressed flat and gleamed with moisture. Such vigour came rolling in from the fields and the down beyond that it was difficult to keep the eyes strictly turned upon the book. The rooks too were keeping one of their annual festivities; soaring round the tree tops until it looked as if a vast net with thousands of black knots in it had been cast up into the air; which, after a few moments, sank slowly down upon the trees until every twig seemed to have a knot at the end of it. Then, suddenly, the net would be thrown into the air again in a wider circle this time, with the utmost clamour and vociferation, as though to be thrown into the air and settle slowly down upon the tree tops were a tremendously exciting experience. </p><p align="justify"> The same energy which inspired the rooks, the ploughmen, the horses, and even, it seemed, the lean bare-backed downs, sent the moth fluttering from side to side of his square of the window-pane. One could not help watching him. One was, indeed, conscious of a queer feeling of pity for him. The possibilities of pleasure seemed that morning so enormous and so various that to have only a moth's part in life, and a day moth's at that, appeared a hard fate, and his zest in enjoying his meagre opportunities to the full, pathetic. He flew vigorously to one corner of his compartment, and, after waiting there a second, flew across to the other. What remained for him but to fly to a third corner and then to a fourth? That was all he could do, in spite of the size of the downs, the width of the sky, the far-off smoke of houses, and the romantic voice, now and then, of a steamer out at sea. What he could do he did. Watching him, it seemed as if a fibre, very thin but pure, of the enormous energy of the world had been thrust into his frail and diminutive body. As oten as he crossed the pane, I could fancy that a thread of vital light became visible. He was little or nothing but life. </p><p align="justify"> Yet, because he was so small, and so simple a form of the energy that was rolling in at the open window and driving its way through so many narrow and intricate corridors in my own brain and in those of other human beings, there was something marvelous as well as pathetic about him. It was as if someone had taken a tiny bead of pure life and decking it as lightly as possible with down and feathers, had set it dancing and zigzagging to show us the true nature of life. Thus displayed one could not get over the strangeness of it. One is apt to forget all about life, seeing it humped and bossed and garnished and cumbered so that it has to move with the greatest circumspection and dignity. Again, the thought of all that life might have been had he been born in any other shape caused one to view his simple activities with a kind of pity. </p><p align="justify"> After a time, tired by his dancing apparently, he settled on the window ledge in the sun, and, the queer spectacle being at an end, I forgot about him. Then, looking up, my eye was caught by him. He was trying to resume his dancing, but seemed either so stiff or so awkward that he could only flutter to the bottom of the window-pane; and when he tried to fly across it he failed. Being intent on other matters I watched these futile attempts for a time without thinking, unconsciously waiting for him to resume his flight, as one waits for a machine, that has stopped momentarily, to start again without considering the reason of its failure. After perhaps a seventh attempt he slipped from the wooden ledge and fell, fluttering his wings, onto his back on the window sill. The helplessness of his attitude roused me. It flashed upon me he was in difficulties; he could no longer raise himself; his legs struggled vainly. But, as I stretched out a pencil, meaning to help him to right himself, it came over me that the failure and awkwardness were the approach of death. I laid the pencil down again. </p><p align="justify"> The legs agitated themselves once more. I looked as if for the enemy against which he struggled. I looked out of doors. What had happened there? Presumably it was midday, and work in the fields had stopped. Stillness and quiet had replaced the previous animation. The birds had taken themselves off to feed in the brooks. The horses stood still. Yet the power was there all the same, massed outside indifferent, impersonal, not attending to anything in particular. Somehow it was opposed to the little hay-coloured moth. It was useless to try to do anything. One could only watch the extraordinary efforts made by those tiny legs against an oncoming doom which could, had it chosen, have submerged an entire city, not merely a city, but masses of human beings; nothing, I knew, had any chance against death. Nevertheless after a pause of exhaustion the legs fluttered again. It was superb this last protest, and so frantic that he succeeded at last in righting himself. One's sympathies, of course, were all on the side of life. Also, when there was nobody to care or to know, this gigantic effort on the part of an insignificant little moth, against a power of such, magnitude, to retain what no one else valued or desired to keep, moved one strangely. Again, somehow, one saw life a pure bead. I lifted the pencil again, useless though I knew it to be. But even as I did so, the unmistakable tokens of death showed themselves. The body relaxed, and instantly grew stiff. The struggle was over. The insignificant little creature now knew death. As I looked at the dead moth, this minute wayside triumph of so great a force over so mean an antagonist filled me with wonder. Just as life had been strange a few minutes before, so death was now as strange. The moth having righted himself now lay most decently and uncomplainingly composed. O yes, he seemed to say, death is stronger than I am. </p><p align="right"> (Virginia Wolf, "The Death of the Moth", - in:<br> William Smart "Eight Modern Essayists",<br> New York, 1995, pp. 5-7)<br> </p> <h1 align="center"> Bibliography </h1> <br> <OL type=1)> <LI>Essay on the Essay: Redefining the genre. Bytrym, Alexandre J., Univ. of Ga. Press</LI> <LI>Elements of the essay. Robert Scholes, Carl H. Klaus, New York, Oxford Univ. press</LI> <LI>Eight Modern Essayists. William Smart. Virgina Centre for Creative Arts, St. Martin s Press, New York.</LI> <LI> -<>F8>=0;L=>ABL B5:AB0  (=0 <0B5@80;5 -AA5 6. . @8AB;8) .</LI> <LI> Academic Writing Recommendation  . . 5;8:0O.</LI> <LI> Encyclopedia Americana .</LI> </OL> </body> </html>