The Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Essays PDF
Preview The Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Essays
The Bread Loaf Anthology of title: Contemporary American Essays author: Pack, Robert publisher: University Press of New England isbn10 | asin: 0874514754 print isbn13: 9780874514759 ebook isbn13: 9780585274249 language: English subject American essays--20th century. publication date: 1989 lcc: PS688.B687 1989eb ddc: 814/.54/08 subject: American essays--20th century. Page i The Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Essays Page ii PUBLISHED FOR THE BREAD LOAF WRITERS' CONFERENCE Middlebury College Page iii The Bread Loaf Anthology of Contemporary American Essays Edited by Robert Pack and Jay Parini Page iv UNIVERSITY PRESS OF NEW ENGLAND Brandeis University Brown University Clark University University of Connecticut Dartmouth College University of New Hampshire University of Rhode Island Tufts University University of Vermont © 1989 by Bread Loaf Writer's Conference/Middlebury College All rights reserved. Except for brief quotation in critical articles or reviews, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For further information contact University Press of New England, Hanover, NH 03755. Printed in the United States of America LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA The Bread Loaf anthology of contemporary American essays. Bibliography: p. I. American essays20th century. I. Pack, Robert, 1929 . II. Parini, Jay. III. Bread Loaf Writers' Conference of Middlebury College. PS688.B687 1989 814'.54'08 8840352 ISBN 0-87451-476-2 ISBN 0-87451-475-4 (pbk.) ISBN 0-87451-475-4 (pbk.) 5 4 3 2 1 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS All of the essays in this collection appear by special permission of the authors. Some of the essays first appeared in periodicals, private editions, or elsewhere. To their editors, thanks are due. "Writer and Region" by Wendell Berry first appeared in The Hudson Review. "Freud" by Harold Bloom was privately printed by the Simon H. Rifkin Center for the Humanities in a volume called The Strong Light of the Canonical. (continued on page 379) Page v Foreword The dean of American essayists, E. B. White, described the practitioner of his particular art in extravagant terms: "The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest. He is a fellow who thoroughly enjoys his work, just as people who take bird walks enjoy theirs. Each new excursion of the essayists, each new 'attempt,' differs from the last and takes him into new country. This delights him. Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays." White, of course, was teasing. But only just. The essay, as a genre, demands a peculiar "effrontery" and "stamina." Unlike the poem or story, the essay proclaims itself as its author's own thoughts. It seems to demandor enforcea kind of honesty, since the essayist must struggle to define himself or herself as well as the subject at hand. Thus, the essay seems naturally to attract autobiographers, writers willing to weather the pressures that attend the creation of selfhood. White's allusion to the essay as an "attempt" refers to the linguistic origins of the form (the term derives from the French essai, meaning a "try"), which underscores the necessary tentativeness of the genre. An essay is not an article; it is not a thorough, scholarly treatment of an isolated subject. By definition it is an exploration, a journey out that frequently becomes, in the best examples, an inward journey, too, a picking at the thread which finally unravels the garment of the writer's particular concern and scrutiny. The form itself has a distinguished history, beginning with Montaigne, who wrote in the latter half of the sixteenth century. The English, of course, have provided endless essayists of note, such as Dr. Johnson, Addison and Steele, Hazlitt, Macauley, Huxley and Page vi Orwell. The American essay, too, has a rich history, with Emerson and Thoreau not least among its practitioners. Far from being obsolete, the form has attracted many of our best writers in recent decades, and we are delighted to present a sampling here of essays written in the last five years by some of our most distinguished writers. Essays come in as many varieties as beans, and we think the range of the essays here will surprise most readers. Their subjects range from Freud (Harold Bloom), Frost (William Pritchard) and Sinclair Lewis (David Bain) to evolution (Stephen J. Gould) and astrophysics (Heinz Pagels). Some adopt a scholarly approach and style (Lawrence Buell, Marcus Klein, Robert Brustein, Paul Mariani), while others add a more personal, autobiographical note to an otherwise scholarly essay (Robert Pack, Cynthia Ozick, Anatole Broyard). The genre has always provided a lively forum for social critics, thus we include iconoclastic essays by Gore Vidal and Ron Powers. The tradition of nature writing associated in particular with American writers is represented in this collection by Robert Finch, John Elder, Noel Perrin, and Don Mitchell. The "familiar essay"the kind that Thurber and White made famoushas its contemporary incarnations here in Samuel Pickering, Paul Fussell, Jay Parini, David Huddle, and Nancy Mairs. The essay has also attracted some of America's finest imaginative writers, from Henry James to Joyce Carol Oates. We include a fair sample of essays by poets (Wendell Berry, Nancy Willard, Linda Pastan) and novelists (William Gass, Gail Godwin, Joyce Carol Oates, Lore Segal, and Hilma Wolitzer); we also include a short story by Tim O'Brien written in the guise of an essayan intriguing use of the essay voice. Not all of the contributors to this volume have attended or taught at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference (though most, in fact, have visited or attended in some capacity). Each subscribes, in his or her way, to the standards of excellence, the commitment to clarity and intellectual honesty, that Bread Loafthe nation's oldest writers' conferencehas represented for over six decades. We hope this anthology provides many hours of informed enjoyment to our readers. ROBERT PACK JAY PARINI
Description:The list of books you might like
