25 Years Ago in These Pages
“Back to the Essay”
“In this same spirit of valuing possibility and innovation, the current editors are now equipping WLT to engage with this century much as Roy House equipped it for the last. . . . Paramount among these changes is the focus on the ‘essay’ as the preferred mode for this journal. . . . The essay tradition is not a prescriptive one of writing in a certain mold, but a capacious one defined mainly by a strategy for maintaining effective ties among writing form, the material being discussed, and the intended audience. Essays in the main tradition tend to have a definable perspective, even on occasion a personal one, and they speak in an idiom that reaches a broad audience. They tend to emphasize the occasion for foregrounding a question or issue as important, and they tend to demonstrate the argument in the form of the essay itself. This is Montaigne’s point about adapting the essay to fit its material, and this tendency to embody an argument and present it as current testimony rather than as prior authority is a strong sign of being on the essay’s terrain.”
—Robert Con Davis-Undiano,
“Back to the Essay: World Literature Today
in the Twenty-First Century,” WLT 74, no. 1 (Winter 2000): 9
