Is the essay literature or philosophy? A form of art or a form of knowledge? The contemporary essay is torn between its belletrist ancestry and its claim to philosophical legitimacy. The Spanish philosopher Eduardo Nicol captured the genre's uncertain status when he dubbed it “almost literature and almost philosophy” (Nicol 1961:207). The problem is hardly a new one. It goes back to what Plato called the “ancient quarrel” between poetry and philosophy, and more recently to the German Romantic theorist, Friedrich (...) Schlegel, who called for a mode of criticism which would be at once philosophical and poetic. But today, when the status of critical discourse is up for grabs, reflecting the crisis of knowledge in the universities, the question of the essay takes on a new urgency. Now the predominant form of writing in the human sciences, it cannot avoid the challenge to define itself according to the prevailing standards of scientific knowledge and method. (shrink)

One of the more telling symptoms of the postmodern condition is the tendency of criticism to renounce any claim to explanatory or evaluative competence vis-à-vis its objects, and in some cases even to deny that it differs from those objects. This is especially evident in American deconstructionists of the Yale school, who have, with Derrida, rediscovered Nietzsche's insight that all language, whatever the genre, is inescapably metaphorical. From the admitted difficulty of drawing absolute ontological distinctions between the language of literature (...) and that of criticism, these critics infer that the attempt to maintain even a generic division between the two languages is at best a convenient fiction, at worst a repressive one. (shrink)