英美散文讲义(2)

is practicable as a middle-of-the-roader.

2） Where does the essay place in the overall picture of literature?

Prose↗fiction,histories,dictionaries,encyclopedias,cellphonese,etc.

↘essays

Poetry→epics,songs and ballads, sonnets, metaphysicals, blank verse, odes, lyrics,etc.

Essays

↙ ↘

familiar/personal formal/impersonal

↓ ↓

narrative critical/academic

descriptive informative

reflective expository

lyrical argumentative/polemical

autobiographical biographical

conversational oratory

epistolary journalistic

diurnal documentary

etc. etc.

3） How did the essay in its narrow sense take its rise? What are the peculiarities of

the familiar essay?

Broadly and loosely speaking, we can trace the essay to ancient Greco-Roman times when, for instance, Socrates portrayed by Plato was engaged in dialogues with his disciples resulting in prose in a conversational and expository style on topics such as ethics and logic among other things. That happened in the fifth century before Christ. Interestingly, whether by mere accident or by any hitherto unknown rule of evolvement in stages of common human intellect, the pre-Qin Chinese master scholars preceding Socrates by roughly one century had left behind similar words of wisdom – in prose more or less in a conversational style as is evidenced by, say, Analects of Confucius. Later in the Western scene we find more examples in Cicero with his political polemics/oratories On the Republic and On the Laws and Seneca (the Younger) writing about rhetoric and stoic philosophy, also apologizing for Emperor Nero’s excesses. Coming back to the Greek scene, we have Plutarch, who wrote Lives of Noble (or Famous) Greeks and Romans, commonly known as Parallel Lives, prose of a biographical style, upon which Shakespeare drew heavily.

Here is a quote from Plutarch’s The Consolation:

―The soul, being eternal, after death is like a caged bird that has been released. If it has been a long time in the body, and has become tame by many affairs and long habit, the soul will immediately take another body and once again become involved in the troubles of the world. The worst thing about old age is that the soul's memory of the

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