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personal essay

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personal essay

Encyclopedia of the Essay, edited by Tracy Chevalier (Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1997)

Definition:

A short work of autobiographical nonfiction characterized by a sense of intimacy and a conversational manner.

As Annie Dillard says of creative nonfiction in general, the personal essay "is all over the map . . .. There's nothing you can't do with it. No subject matter is forbidden, no structure is proscribed. You get to make up your own form every time" ("To Fashion a Text," 1998).

See also:

Examples of Personal Essays:

Observations:

  • Self and Subject in Personal Essays
    "[W]here the familiar essay is characterized by its everyday subject matter, the personal essay is defined more by the personality of its writer, which takes precedence over subject. On the other hand, the personal essayist does not place himself firmly in center stage, as does the autobiographical essayist; the autobiographical element of the personal essay is far less calculated. . . .

    "The subject matter of personal essays traditionally concerns common things, tending, as [Phillip] Lopate puts it, toward 'a taste for littleness.' Human relations with family and friends is a frequent topic, as are childhood reminiscences, and the consideration of pastimes such as travel, walking, and sheer idleness. While the personal essayist often has a serious point to make, it is rare that the essay's subject will be overtly political . . ..

    "The tone of the personal essay is usually light, often nostalgic without being sentimental, gently humorous, rarely didactic."
    (Theresa Werner, "Personal Essay." Encyclopedia of the Essay, ed. by Tracy Chevalier. Fitzroy Dearborn, 1997)


  • The Essayist's Persona
    "Personal essayists from Montaigne on have been fascinated with the changeableness and plasticity of the materials of human personality. Starting with self-description, they have realized they can never render all at once the entire complexity of a personality. So they have elected to follow an additive strategy, offering incomplete shards, one mask or persona after another: the eager, skeptical, amiable, tender, curmudgeonly, antic, somber. If 'we must remove the mask,' it is only to substitute another mask. . . .

    "[T]he personal essayist tries to make his many partial selves dance to the same beat--to unite, through force of voice and style, these discordant, fragmentary personae so that the reader can accept them as issuing from one coherent self."
    (Phillip Lopate, Introduction to The Art of the Personal Essay. Anchor Books, 1994)


  • "The essayist arises in the morning and, if he has work to do, selects his garb from an unusually extensive wardrobe: he can pull on any sort of shirt, be any sort of person, according to his mood or his subject matter--philosopher, scold, jester, raconteur, confidant, pundit, devil's advocate, enthusiast."
    (E.B. White, Foreword to Essays of E.B. White. Harper and Row, 1977)


  • "Given the opportunity to speak their own authority as writers, given a turn in the conversation, students can claim their stories as primary source material and transform their experiences into evidence. . . .

    "I want my students to know what writers know--to know something no researchers could ever find out no matter how many times they pin my students to the table, no matter how many protocols they tape. I want my students to know how to bring their life and their writing together."
    (Nancy Sommers, "Between the Drafts." College Composition and Communication, Feb. 1992)


  • Essay Forms
    "Despite the anthologists' custom of presenting essays as 'models of organization,' it is the loose structure or apparent shapelessness of the essay that is often stressed in standard definitions. . . . Samuel Johnson famously defined the essay as 'an irregular, indigested piece, not a regular and orderly performance.' And certainly a number of essayists (Hazlitt and Emerson, for instance, after the fashion of Montaigne) are readily identifiable by the wayward or fragmentary nature of their explorations. Yet each of these writers observes certain distinctive organizing (or disorganizing) principles of his own, thus charting the ramble and shaping the form. As Jeanette Harris observes in Expressive Discourse, 'Even in the case of a personal essay, which may appear informal and loosely structured, the writer has crafted with care this very appearance of informality' (122).

    "Perhaps distracted by the artificial 'modes of exposition' promoted by textbook authors, critics have generally paid insufficient attention to the principles of design actually employed by successful essayists. For the most part, such principles are not formal patterns of organization but rather patterns of thought: the dramatic progressions of a mind engaged in the search for form."
    (Richard F. Nordquist, "Voices of the Modern Essay." Diss. Univ. of Georgia, 1991)

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