annotated source 01/13

Lopate, Phillip. "Introduction." Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present. Ed. Phillip Lopate. New York: Anchor, 1995. Print.

Lopate's anthology Art of the Personal Essay is practically the bible of personal essays, and his introduction gives readers a theoretical background and foundation for the rest of the anthology (which is why I chose the introduction alone for this source). Lopate defines personal essays by their characteristics, namely: "The Controversial Element," "Honesty, Confession, and Privacy," "Contradictions and Expansions of the Self," "The Role of Contrariety," "The Idler Figure," etc. (PHEW!). The list does go on, but you get the idea. Within these characteristics, he explains using examples from the classical essayists whom he includes in the anthology (Montaigne, Lamb, Hazlitt, Seneca, etc.), and he builds his ethos by relying not only on his own knowledge but on the knowledge and opinion of his essay predecessors. This is an extremely helpful theoretical piece, because he delineates so many points of the essay that I will be studying as I read in London. Lopate's introduction can tell me what makes Charles Lamb an essayist instead of just a nonfiction writer, for example.

So when I write in my own voice, he will be very helpful because I can go back and analyze the elements of essays that I wish to imitate stylistically.