Mr. Levingston was the agile soloist in Ms. Bielawa's "Rondolette," a quintet for piano and strings that begins with a Mozartean flourish but is quickly transformed into a more modern essay in texture and interplay, with strikingly assertive solo writing for each instrument amid tightly woven ensemble passages.
Ever since Michel de Montaigne, the founder of the modern essay, gave as a motto his befuddled "What do I know?" and put forth a vision of humanity as mentally wavering and inconstant, the essay has become a meadow inviting contradiction, paradox, irresolution and self-doubt.
Amelia, Mama, Mimi and Lala are a family created by an open adoption, which took place in Seattle five years ago and was recounted by Ms. Hauseman in a Modern Love essay that was published in The New York Times on Dec. 27, 2012.
In 2005, Ms. Waldman published a Modern Love essay in The Times on her toe-curling sex life, stating that she loved her husband more than her children, a proclamation she was eviscerated for on "The View," "The Oprah Winfrey Show" and countless blogs.
This macabre trend in modern essay writing, whether it manifests itself as a cancer column in a newspaper or as a cancer memoir with a maudlin title is not really the fault of the writers themselves.
Michel de Montaigne (1533-92) is principally known today as a literary figure--the inventor of the modern essay and the pioneer of autobiographical self-exploration who retired from politics in midlife to write his private, philosophical, and apolitical Essais.
Reading and Writing the Modern Essay; Nonfiction Writing, Voice and Structure.
English 248: Writing the Television Drama; English 123: Introduction to Creative Writing; English 120: Reading and Writing the Modern Essay.
Woolf outlines her literary philosophy in the introductory essay to the first series, "The Common Reader," and in the concluding essay to the second series, "How Should One Read a Book?" The first series includes essays on Geoffrey Chaucer, Michel de Montaigne, Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Joseph Conrad, as well as discussions of the Greek language and the modern essay.
France could invent the modern essay, but the notion that someone might seize on the production of these fugitive-seeming pieces as a defining mode was too far-fetched to bear naming.
Serious speculations, on the other hand, have tended to overburden the modern essay, especially in German and in French, and to weigh it with philosophy almost as pedantic as that of academic treatises, though not as rigorous.
