![]() Against this backdrop, “Once More to the Lake” becomes a rich allegorical essay, mournfully anticipating the catastrophic trajectory of the American Century. It included articles with titles like “The Great Defense Migration,” “Education for Freedom,” “The Farm Bloc and the War,” and “Physical Fitness and the Draft.”. He’d written a excoriating review of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, lambasted the collaborationist, and often anti-Semitic, views of Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, criticized Chamberlain’s “horse trade” in Munich, and bemoaned his own tendency to stick to what he called the “spineless middle ground.” The Pearl Harbor bombing was two months away, but in October of 1941 Harper’s (which can be viewed at ) was already full of war news. In his Harper’scolumn, White had been making the case against fascists abroad and isolationists at home for three years. ![]() Readers in the fall of 1941 approached White’s essay quite differently. Finally, they almost always use head notes and discussion questions to push students toward a reading of the essay as a nostalgia piece about fathers and sons, often recommending it as a prompt for awhat-I-did-on-my-summer-vacation essay. Nor do they mention where the essay was first published-inWhite’s “One Man’s Meat” column for Harper’s. If they do, they rarely remind contemporary readers of the historical events of that time period. As Robert Root has shown, although it was widely anthologized, the anthologies that include it only occasionally mention when the piece was published (October 1941). ![]() ![]() White’s “Once More to the Lake,” the most widely anthologized American essay of the last half of the 20th century. This is not to say that studying the historical and rhetorical context of an essay is a substitute for close reading, but rather that it is a necessary complement to it. The form of an essay is best understood when the author’s choices are examined in the historical and cultural context in which the piece was written. Is the selection current and accessible? Can it be used to model this or that rhetorical mode? Is it short enough for use in a one-hour class? Is it in the public domain, and if not, how much will the permissions cost? Will it help diversify the anthology in terms of race, ethnicity, and gender? Does it help establish a balance between classic and contemporary essays, and between emerging authors and established big names? These concerns are real and understandable, but they push toward the inclusion shorter, simpler, “teachable” essays. Editors select essays for first-year writing anthologies with the needs of these beginning teachers and their students in mind. New teaching assistants are assigned multiple sections in which they are expected to introduce the entire writing process, from brainstorming to proofreading. Because of this, the essay is dismissed as a service genre used to write about other, more “literary” genres, an implement used to teach first-year college students how to write. As a result, the essay canon is fundamentally a teaching instrument and not a historical, critical or national force. In her groundbreaking 1999 article “The Essay Canon, ” Lynn Bloom argued that the essays most people know-the essays that establish the canon and define thegenre-are the ones that appear most frequently in freshman composition anthologies.
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