Essays and measure: Apprenticeships in genre

The essay is a ubiquitous genre with a long and varied history, but straightforward categorisation remains notoriously difficult. Literary taxonomists often define the essay as indefinable, and many theoretical studies similarly emphasise its remarkable formal openness. In this dissertation, I argue that the essay can be more helpfully understood as a writerly practice that continuously revises the impressions and judgements of human experience, and that precisely because it complicates notions of genre, combines art and science, and mixes stylistic and rhetorical techniques, becomes the most precise form for situations in which one cannot really work precisely. The formula also expresses my project’s main hypothesis: the essay has a remarkable ability to create its own principles and conditions of measure. By bringing together various literary and audiovisual essayists I investigate how ‘weighing in the absence of clear measure’ can be negotiated with and through the essay form. Each chapter discusses a different permutation of this paradoxical measuring: a fantasy science of degrees in the work of Roland Barthes, the limits of factual discourse in the writings of critics Marc Nichanian and John D’Agata, the hardships of artistic research in times of acceleration in the critical art practice of Hito Steyerl, the search for a writerly mode that is commensurable with traumatic experience in the oeuvre of Zabel Yesayan, and the legacy of Michel de Montaigne’s skepticism in contemporary uses of the essay as a school assignment