The Essay: Theory and Praxis

An essay, Lukács once said, is not yet form, but form on the way to becoming form. It is something in between: between art, science, and philosophy, between reason and intuition, between "precision and soul" (Musil). We will begin with the idea of the essay in Montaigne and Francis Bacon, and trace its development in Germany's intellectual and literary history from around 1870 till 1960. We will try to understand why, during this period, the essay became the preferred medium of thought and one of the dominant forms of reflecting on great Westerns narratives as well as important contemporary discourses.