Definition:
In composition studies, a discontinuous essay form made up of discrete bits of discourse--description, dialogue, narrative, explanation, and the like.
A collage essay (also known as a discontinuous essay or patchwork essay) generally forgoes conventional transitions, leaving it up to the reader to locate or impose connections between the fragmented observations.
See also:
Examples of Collage Essays:
- "Lying Awake," by Charles Dickens
- "A 'Now': Descriptive of a Hot Day," by Leigh Hunt
- "Suite Américaine," by H.L. Mencken
Examples and Observations:
- "Many feature stories in daily and especially Sunday newspapers drift into the collage form--for example, a neighborhood in Brooklyn written up in a series of bits that present rather than explain: portraits of people and of terrain, street corner scenes, mini-narratives, dialogues, and reminiscent monologues. . . .
"You might make a collage essay on the causes of the French Revolution that consists entirely of stories, portraits, and scenes. You would have to choose and arrange your fragments in such a way that they tell why the French Revolution happened as it did. Or you might have one that consists entirely of dialogues: between nobles, peasants, middle-class city dwellers, and thinkers of the period; between people who came before and those who came afterwards. Of course you may have to revise and polish some of these fragments to make them as good as possible--perhaps even write some more bits to give at least a minimal coherence."
(Peter Elbow, Writing With Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process, 2nd ed. Oxford Univ. Press, 1998) - Collage: E.B. White's Essay "Hot Weather"
Morning is so closely associated with brisk affairs, music with evening and day's end, that when I hear a three-year-old dance tune crooned upon the early air while shadows still point west and the day is erect in the saddle, I feel faintly decadent, at loose ends, as though I were in the South Seas--a beachcomber waiting for a piece of fruit to fall, or for a brown girl to appear naked from a pool.
* * *
Asterisks? So soon?
* * *
It is a hot-weather sign, the asterisk. The cicada of the typewriter, telling the long steaming noons. Don Marquis was one of the great exponents of the asterisk. The heavy pauses between his paragraphs, could they find a translator, would make a book for the ages.
* * *
Don knew how lonely everybody is. "Always the struggle of the human soul is to break through the barriers of silence and distance into companionship. Friendship, lust, love, art, religion--we rush into them pleading, fighting, clamoring for the touch of spirit laid against our spirit." Why else would you be reading this fragmentary page--you with the book in your lap? You're not out to learn anything, certainly. You just want the healing action of some chance corroboration, the soporific of spirit laid against spirit. Even if you had read only to crab about everything I say, your letter of complaint is a dead give-away: you are unutterably lonely or you wouldn't have taken the trouble to write it. . . .
(E.B. White, "Hot Weather." One Man's Meat. Harper & Row, 1944) - Collage in Joan Didion's Essay "Slouching Towards Bethlehem"
"At three-thirty that afternoon Max, Tom, and Sharon placed tabs under their tongues and sat down together in the living room to wait for the flash. Barbara stayed in the bedroom, smoking hash. During the next four hours a window banged once in Barbara's room and about five-thirty some children had a fight on the street. A curtain billowed in the afternoon wind. A cat scratched a beagle in Sharon's lap. Except for the sitar music on the stero there was no other sound or movement until seven-thirty, when Max said, 'Wow.'"
(Joan Didion, "Slouching Towards Bethlehem." Slouching Towards Bethlehem. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1968) - Discontinuous or Paratactic Essays
"[T]he serial arrangement of pieces in a discontinuous essay results in a composition the whole of which can only be taken in gradually and therefore can only be held entirely in mind by a special act of will. Indeed, the fragmented mode of presentation tacitly invites one to consider each segment in and of itself, in relation to every other segment and in relation to the entire set of pieces, resulting in a complex network of understandings gradually arrived at rather than a whole work immediately perceived. . . .
"'Discontinuous'--it works so well to denote the visible and substantive breaks in a segmented piece that it seems to be the most accurate descriptive term. But it might have negative connotations--like many words beginning with 'dis'--so I've been pondering a more neutral term, such as 'paratactic,' from the Greek 'parataxis,' which refers to the placement of clauses or phrases side by side without any type of conjunction. . . . Though it's hardly so chic and culturally relevant a term as 'collage,' parataxis is certainly more akin to what happens in essays such as [George] Orwell's 'Marrakech,' [E.B.] White's 'Spring,' [Annie] Dillard's 'Living Like Weasels,' and [Joyce Carol] Oates's 'My Father, My Fiction,' all of which contain discrete sentences, paragraphs, or longer units of discourse placed side by side without any connective or transitional material between them."
(Carl H. Klaus, The Made-Up Self: Impersonation in the Personal Essay. Univ. of Iowa Press, 2010)
