Editorial [CounterText, 9(3)]

Abstract

Surely the time of the essay is secure, surely the essay is … timeless. Confidence in that assertion is among the aspects up for discussion in this special issue of CounterText on ‘The Time of the Essay’. Curated by Mario Aquilina, whose recent co-editorial work around the essay makes him well-placed to draw reactions to that presumed timelessness (see The Edinburgh Companion to the Essay, 2022 and The Essay at the Limits: Poetics, Politics, Form, 2021), the issue brings together responses by leading scholars and practitioners of the form. Sensitive to the genres and sub-genres of the essay, to its histories and traditions, and to contrasting impressions on the form’s precarity and adaptability, these contributions offer important perspectives on how the time of the essay might be characterised and on the implications and stakes of that undertaking. They recognise but also critique the idea of the essay’s origins in Montaigne, and thereby the coincidings with the stirrings of the institutionality of literature as it has come to be understood in the present. They explore the form’s shifting natures amid the evolving affordances of contemporary technoculture. They consider the nature of the essayistic, as much as of the essay. The former, if not the latter, must surely always have been with us, retains its presence and trenchancy, will always be with us. Yet again, then, the essay(istic): when and how, why and where, in and for what time? These are not small questions. Sometimes obliquely, sometimes directly, what the responses in this issue demonstrate is that to interrogate the time of the essay is to investigate a distinct yet emblematic scene of the post-literary. How and in what ways the time of the essay might thereby be an occasion for the countertextual is what is explored in these pages.