Time in the essay ; or, essayistic temporality

Abstract

Time, its passing, the way it affects experience, the way we are tied with temporality and with an acute awareness of mortality, and the attempt to make sense of it all or to envisage or imagine a different time or a specific future, are central motifs in many essays. This essay focuses on how certain conceptions of time are essential to the essayistic. The ‘essayistic’, often described as an ‘impulse’ in the essay or its ‘spirit’, is here conceived as a mode that is closely tied to the essay as a form or genre with specific formal or thematic characteristics but that can also appear elsewhere. Essays by Michel de Montaigne, Charles Lamb, William Hazlitt, Joan Didion, E. B. White, Annie Dillard, Emily Ogden, and Valeria Luiselli are read closely from the perspective of what they suggest about essayistic temporality.