The Essay in the Academy: Between “Literature” and “Creative Writing”

Abstract

The essay has not fared well in the academy. Graduate study, university presses, and the Modern Language Association have, none of them, treated the essay with respect; indeed, its eclipse begins in the late nineteenth century just as the powerful and nearly defining forces were reaching our shores. Although we now inhabit “the age of the essay,” or so we have been told, the academy has belatedly begun to take notice.¹ Still, it has not exactly embraced the venerable form. Rather, the academy has, somewhat grudgingly, begun to accept essays as part of “the fourth genre,” jobs have opened in the teaching of essay writing (as part of “ nonfiction”), university-based periodicals have made room for essays in their brittle pages, and university presses have published essayists like Sam Pickering, Nancy Mairs, Phillip Garrison, Amy Blackmarr, and Scott Russell Sanders.