The Essay and the Nature of Discourse in Literary Criticism

Abstract

Lukács and Adorno were both theoreticians and practitioners of the essay. They understood the essay as a genre halfway between art and the “objectivizing” disciplines. However, can texts that are wittily composed, often philosophically oriented, without strict systematization and, above all, written without footnotes, references, or a works-cited section (following MLA guidelines) and appertaining to literary studies be understood as academic or scholarly? They apparently do not fulfill the requirements of scholarship, not only according to bibliographic standards or the strict criteria of national scholarly bodies, but also according to rules in force in scholarly periodicals. The author examines this issue in line with his understanding of the scope and subject matter of literary studies. In his opinion, this is twofold: the study of literature as representation and as singularity. As representation, literature is accessible to scholarly research, whether the discipline in question is literary studies or any other. As singularity, however, it does not appertain to the same domain. “Singularity names the specific being of a text or work, inflected so as to underline its resistance to being described in general categories or concepts” (Clark, The Poetics of Singularity 2), which are characteristic of scholarly discourse. With this in mind, the author concludes that – although in many respects the discourse that is desirable and approved of in contemporary literary studies as a serious, academic, scholarly discipline seems to be at odds with the discourse typical of essays – the essay supplements scholarly discourse particularly in addressing those topics that are inaccessible to strictly organized, systematic research, but represent the essential part of the “phenomenon” of literature; namely, its uniqueness and singularity.