Essay, Life, Lived Experience: The Early Georg Lukács and the Situation of Literary Criticism Today

T hat we like the essay as a genre of writing and reading belongs to our self-understood premises, as early twenty-first century intellectuals. If immediate evidence was necessary, it could be encountered in most of the texts making up the collection to which this essay belongs. For example, invoking authorities beyond any possible doubt or skepticism, like Francis Ponge and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the foundational essays of Michel de Montaigne’s find praise as a “search with no end nor resting place” in Sarah Bakewell’s contribution. What for Sophie Gee distinguishes Jonathan Swift’s worldview from that of his contemporaries is the capacity to “depict minds in disrepair” without claiming an “authority to correct internal turmoil.” Thomas Harrison explains how the essayistic form of Robert Musil’s novel The Man Without Qualities emerged from his attempt to forge a flexible bond between “the literary realm and the realm of the ethical,” while Alex Woloch describes the manner of George Orwell’s essays as “unstable, precarious, short-lived,” and Michael Wood shows that “taking ‘as if ’ no less seriously than ‘is’” was decisive for the essay form as a “project” in Jorge Luis Borges’s work. The vanishing point of all these analyses and the reason for our self-understood sympathy for the genre lies in a gesture of lightness and distance that the different varieties of the essay seem to share. A distance not only from any suggestions of orthodoxy in our post-ideological and perhaps even post-political times, but also from any spiritual position that comes with the impulse