Representation, Ideology, and the Form of the Essay
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/wap.v1i1.11Keywords:
Writing Pedagogy, Writing Theory, Ideology, Montaigne, Althusser, SubjectivityAbstract
This essay examines the beginnings of first-year writing programs in the academy and the early history of the essay to reveal how and why a particularly limiting range of allowable subjectivities entered into the writing classroom through the essay’s form. Most college first-year writing courses privilege a thesis-driven form of the essay that is much closer to Bacon’s (1592/1966) collection of essays, in contrast to those written by Montaigne (1575/1965), who is often referred to as the “Father of the Essay.” Reasons for this practice include the writing curriculum’s seeming alliance with classical rhetoric’s definition of both essay and student writer. The concept of ideology as conceived by Althusser (1968/1971) proves useful for understanding the essay’s implications in subjectivity formation. Although all essay forms are informed by ideology, the act of privileging thesis-driven forms in schooling practices can also privilege the practice of requiring students to take on subjectivities allowed only within those forms. Expanding the writing forms assigned within first-year writing programs can offer writers more open, contradictory possibilities for expressing authority, resistance, critical inquiry, creativity, and difference.
References
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Bennett, T. (1979) Formalism and Marxism. London: Methuen.
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Berlin, J. A. (1988) Rhetoric and ideology in the writing classroom. College English 50: 477–94.
Berlin, J. A. (1987) Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900–1985. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987.
Brodkey, L. (1989) On the subjects of class and gender in “the literacy letters.” College English 51: 125–41.
Butrym, A. J. (1989) Essays on the Essay: Redefining the Genre. A. J. Butrym (ed.) Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Chapman, D. (1991) Forming and meaning: Writing the counterpoint essay. Journal of Advanced Composition 11: 73–82.
Chesterton, G. K. (1930) Come to Think of It: A Book of Essays. London: Methuen.
Clifford, J. (1991) The subject in discourse. In P. Harkin and J. Schilb (eds.) Contending with Words: Composition and Rhetoric in a Postmodern Age 38–51. New York: Modern Language Association.
Dipardo, A. (1993) A Kind of Passport: A Basic Writing Adjunct Program and the Challenge of Student Diversity. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English.
Downing, D. (2005) The Knowledge Contract: Politics and Paradigms in the Academic Workplace. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
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Gerould, K. F. (1935) An essay on essays. The North American Review 240: 409–18.
Goldmann, L. (1959/1964) The Hidden God. (P. Thody, trans.) London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
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Heath, S. B. (1983) Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms. New York: Cambridge.
Heilker, P. (1996) The Essay: Theory and Pedagogy for an Active Form. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English.
Hoagland, E. (1982) What I think, what I am. The Tugman’s Passage 24–7. New York: Random House.
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Johnson, S. (1755/1805) A Dictionary of the English Language in Which the Words are Deduced from their Originals, and Illustrated in their Different Significations by Examples from the Best Writers to Which are Prefixed, a History of the Language, and an English Grammar. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees. Retrieved on 10 January 2009 from http://www.ucalgary.ca/~smit/Scholarship/SamJohnson.htm.
Kauffmann, R. L. (1989) The skewed path: Essaying as unmethodical method. In A. J. Butrym (ed.) Essays on the Essay: Redefining the Genre 221–40. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Klaus, C. H. (1989) Essayists on the essay. In C. Anderson (ed.) Literary Nonfiction: Theory, Criticism, Pedagogy 155–76. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Knoblauch, C. H. and Brannon, L. (1983) Writing as learning through the curriculum. College English 45: 465–74.
Lopate, P. (1994) Introduction. In P. Lopate (ed.) The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present xxiii–liv. New York: Doubleday.
Lukács, G. (1948/1964) Studies in European Realism. (E. Bone, trans.) New York: Grosset and Dunlap.
Luke, A. (1995) Text and discourse in education: An introduction to critical discourse analysis. In M. Apple (ed.) Review of Research in Education 21: 3–48. Washington, D.C.: American Educational Research Association.
Macherey, P. (1966/1989) A Theory of Literary Production. (G. Wall, trans.) London: Routledge.
Macherey, P. (1977) An interview with Pierre Macherey, C. Mercer and J. Radford. (eds and trans.) Red Letters 5: 3–9.
Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1854/1976) On Literature and Art. Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Miller, S. (1991) Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Montaigne, M. de (1575/1965) The Complete Essays of Montaigne. (D. M. Frame, trans.) Stanford: Stanford University Press.
A nation at risk: An imperative for educational reform (1983) Education Week 27: 12–16.
North, S. M. (1987) The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field. Upper Montclair, New Jersey: Boynton Cook.
Ohmann, R. (1976) English in America: A Radical View of the Profession. New York: Oxford University Press.
Plekhanov, G. (1912/1953) Art and Social Life. A. Rothstein (ed.). London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Robillard, A. E. (2003) It’s time for class: How middle-class values impede the workingclass narrative. College English 66(1): 74–92.
Russell, D. (1991) Writing in the Academic Disciplines, 1870–1990: A Curricular History. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Sanders, S. R. (1997) From anonymous, evasive prose to writing with passion. The Chronicle of Higher Education 10: B4–B5.
Sanders, S. R. (1989) The singular first person. In A. J. Butrym (ed.) Essays on the Essay: Redefining the Genre 31–42. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Smith, A. (1863) On the writing of essays. In Dreamthorp: A Book of Essays Written in the Country. Retrieved on 14 January 2009 from P. Madden (ed.) Quotidiana http://essays.quotidiana.org/smith_a/writing_of_essays/
Spear, K. (1997) Controversy and consensus in freshman writing: An overview of the field. The Review of Higher Education 20(3): 319–44.
Stuckey, J. E. (1991) The Violence of Literacy. Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Boynton/Cook.
United States. (1983) A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform: A Report to the Nation and the Secretary of Education, United States Department of Education. Washington, D.C.: National Commission on Excellence in Education.
Villanueva, V. (2001) The politics of the personal: Storying our lives against the grain. Symposium Collective. College English 64(1): 50–2.
Watt, I. (1974) The Rise of the Novel. Berkeley: University of California Press.
White, E. B. (1977) Foreword. Essays of E. B. White vi-ix. New York: Harper and Row.
Williams, R. (1977) Marxism and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press.
Woolf, V. (1925/1953) The Common Reader. First series. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Zeiger, W. (1985) The exploratory essay: Enfranchising the spirit of inquiry in college composition. College English 47: 454–66.
Adorno, T. (1955/1967) Prisms. (S. and S. Weber, trans.) London: Neville Spearman.
Althusser, L. (1968/1971) Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. (B. Brewster, trans.) London: New Left Books.
Apple, M. (1985) Teachers and Texts. New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Au, W. W. (2008) Unequal By Design: High-Stakes Testing and the Standardization of Inequality. New York: Routledge.
Bacon, F. (1592/1966) Essays. New York: Oxford.
Bakhtin, M. (1929/1973) Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics. (R. W. Rotsel, trans.) Ann Arbor: Ardis.
Balibar, E. and Macherey, M. (1974/1992) On literature as an ideological form: Some Marxist propositions. (I. McLeod, J. Whitehead, and A. Wordsworth, trans.) In F. Mulhern (ed.) Contemporary Marxist Literary Criticism 35–54. London: Longman.
Bartholomae, D. (1985) Inventing the university. In M. Rose (ed.) When a Writer Can’t Write 134–65. New York: Guilford.
Belsey, C. (1980) Critical Practice. New York: Routledge.
Bennett, T. (1979) Formalism and Marxism. London: Methuen.
Bensmaïa, R. (1987) The Barthes Effect: The Essay as Reflective Text. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Berlin, J. A. (1988) Rhetoric and ideology in the writing classroom. College English 50: 477–94.
Berlin, J. A. (1987) Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1900–1985. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1987.
Brodkey, L. (1989) On the subjects of class and gender in “the literacy letters.” College English 51: 125–41.
Butrym, A. J. (1989) Essays on the Essay: Redefining the Genre. A. J. Butrym (ed.) Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Chapman, D. (1991) Forming and meaning: Writing the counterpoint essay. Journal of Advanced Composition 11: 73–82.
Chesterton, G. K. (1930) Come to Think of It: A Book of Essays. London: Methuen.
Clifford, J. (1991) The subject in discourse. In P. Harkin and J. Schilb (eds.) Contending with Words: Composition and Rhetoric in a Postmodern Age 38–51. New York: Modern Language Association.
Dipardo, A. (1993) A Kind of Passport: A Basic Writing Adjunct Program and the Challenge of Student Diversity. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English.
Downing, D. (2005) The Knowledge Contract: Politics and Paradigms in the Academic Workplace. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Durst, R. (1984) The development of analytic writing. In A. N. Applebee (ed.) Contexts for Learning to Write: Studies of Secondary School Instruction 79–102. Norwood, New Jersey: ABLEX.
Eagleton, T. (1978) Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory. London: Verso.
Eagleton, T. (1984) The Function of Criticism: From The Spectator to Post-Structuralism. London: Verso.
Eagleton, T. (1983) Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Faigley, L. (1992) Fragments of Rationality: Postmodernity and the Subject of Composition. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press.
Gerould, K. F. (1935) An essay on essays. The North American Review 240: 409–18.
Goldmann, L. (1959/1964) The Hidden God. (P. Thody, trans.) London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Hall, M. L. (1989) The emergence of the essay and the idea of discovery. In A. J. Butrym (ed.) Essays on the Essay: Redefining the Genre 73–91. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Hardison, O. B., Jr. (1989) Binding proteus. In A. J. Butrym (ed.) Essays on the Essay: Redefining the Genre 11–28. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Hardwick, E. (1986) Introduction. In E. Hardwick (ed.) The Best American Essays 1986 xiii-xxi. New York: Ticknor & Fields.
Heath, S. B. (1983) Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms. New York: Cambridge.
Heilker, P. (1996) The Essay: Theory and Pedagogy for an Active Form. Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English.
Hoagland, E. (1982) What I think, what I am. The Tugman’s Passage 24–7. New York: Random House.
Horner, W. B., Webb, S. S., and Miller, R. K. (1998) Hodges’ Harbrace Handbook. (13th edition.) Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace.
Hyman, A. and Walsh, J. J. (1973) Philosophy in the Middle Ages. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.
Joeres, R. E. B. and Mittman, E. (1993) An introductory essay. In R. E. B. Joeres and E. Mittman (eds.) The Politics of the Essay: Feminist Perspectives 12–20. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Johnson, S. (1755/1805) A Dictionary of the English Language in Which the Words are Deduced from their Originals, and Illustrated in their Different Significations by Examples from the Best Writers to Which are Prefixed, a History of the Language, and an English Grammar. London: Longman, Hurst, Rees. Retrieved on 10 January 2009 from http://www.ucalgary.ca/~smit/Scholarship/SamJohnson.htm.
Kauffmann, R. L. (1989) The skewed path: Essaying as unmethodical method. In A. J. Butrym (ed.) Essays on the Essay: Redefining the Genre 221–40. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Klaus, C. H. (1989) Essayists on the essay. In C. Anderson (ed.) Literary Nonfiction: Theory, Criticism, Pedagogy 155–76. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Knoblauch, C. H. and Brannon, L. (1983) Writing as learning through the curriculum. College English 45: 465–74.
Lopate, P. (1994) Introduction. In P. Lopate (ed.) The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present xxiii–liv. New York: Doubleday.
Lukács, G. (1948/1964) Studies in European Realism. (E. Bone, trans.) New York: Grosset and Dunlap.
Luke, A. (1995) Text and discourse in education: An introduction to critical discourse analysis. In M. Apple (ed.) Review of Research in Education 21: 3–48. Washington, D.C.: American Educational Research Association.
Macherey, P. (1966/1989) A Theory of Literary Production. (G. Wall, trans.) London: Routledge.
Macherey, P. (1977) An interview with Pierre Macherey, C. Mercer and J. Radford. (eds and trans.) Red Letters 5: 3–9.
Marx, K. and Engels, F. (1854/1976) On Literature and Art. Moscow: Progress Publishers.
Miller, S. (1991) Textual Carnivals: The Politics of Composition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Montaigne, M. de (1575/1965) The Complete Essays of Montaigne. (D. M. Frame, trans.) Stanford: Stanford University Press.
A nation at risk: An imperative for educational reform (1983) Education Week 27: 12–16.
North, S. M. (1987) The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field. Upper Montclair, New Jersey: Boynton Cook.
Ohmann, R. (1976) English in America: A Radical View of the Profession. New York: Oxford University Press.
Plekhanov, G. (1912/1953) Art and Social Life. A. Rothstein (ed.). London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Robillard, A. E. (2003) It’s time for class: How middle-class values impede the workingclass narrative. College English 66(1): 74–92.
Russell, D. (1991) Writing in the Academic Disciplines, 1870–1990: A Curricular History. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.
Sanders, S. R. (1997) From anonymous, evasive prose to writing with passion. The Chronicle of Higher Education 10: B4–B5.
Sanders, S. R. (1989) The singular first person. In A. J. Butrym (ed.) Essays on the Essay: Redefining the Genre 31–42. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Smith, A. (1863) On the writing of essays. In Dreamthorp: A Book of Essays Written in the Country. Retrieved on 14 January 2009 from P. Madden (ed.) Quotidiana http://essays.quotidiana.org/smith_a/writing_of_essays/
Spear, K. (1997) Controversy and consensus in freshman writing: An overview of the field. The Review of Higher Education 20(3): 319–44.
Stuckey, J. E. (1991) The Violence of Literacy. Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Boynton/Cook.
United States. (1983) A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Educational Reform: A Report to the Nation and the Secretary of Education, United States Department of Education. Washington, D.C.: National Commission on Excellence in Education.
Villanueva, V. (2001) The politics of the personal: Storying our lives against the grain. Symposium Collective. College English 64(1): 50–2.
Watt, I. (1974) The Rise of the Novel. Berkeley: University of California Press.
White, E. B. (1977) Foreword. Essays of E. B. White vi-ix. New York: Harper and Row.
Williams, R. (1977) Marxism and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press.
Woolf, V. (1925/1953) The Common Reader. First series. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Zeiger, W. (1985) The exploratory essay: Enfranchising the spirit of inquiry in college composition. College English 47: 454–66.
Published
2010-01-16
Issue
Section
Feature Article
How to Cite
Archibald, O. Y. (2010). Representation, Ideology, and the Form of the Essay. Writing and Pedagogy, 1(1), 11-36. https://doi.org/10.1558/wap.v1i1.11
