The longest, and the one Sontag is most proud of, is on Roland Barthes: "The single most ambitious essay in the whole collection and the one that took me longest to write," she says.
Danny Kruger, the new voice of David Cameron, has written an ambitious essay, The right dialectic, in the current issue of Prospect magazine seeking to give some philosophical bottom to the liberal-centrist drift of the new Tory party.
And Smith resembles a French avant-gardist of the 1950s and '60s rather than a postcolonial writer in her most ambitious essay, "Two Directions for the Novel," which attacks the metaphysical pretensions of the "lyrical-realist" tradition that evidently dominates "Anglophone" fiction.
The last and perhaps most ambitious essay here is "An Expedition to the Pole", in which the Victorian and Edwardian polar expeditions are cast as allegories of Dillard's church-going attempts to reach what she calls "the Absolute"; just as those explorers sought the poles, she seeks "the Pole of Relative Inaccessibility located in metaphysics".
MacDonald describes the track as an "ambitious essay in cross-cultural fusion and meditative philosophy" that most commentators dismiss as boring, with critics characterising the music as lacking "harmonic interest" and the lyric as "sanctimonious ... didactic and dated".
This well-selected memorial retrospective includes fascinating Bruegelesque miniatures from the 1960's; large-scale, altarlike portraits of the artist or his wife that combine Magic Realism, photocollage and raw materials like plywood, tile and metal; works of Robert Arneson-style comedy; ambitious essays in realist portraiture; and more.
Finalists: Jonathan Gold of the LA Weekly for his delightful, authoritative restaurant reviews, escorting readers through a city's diverse food culture; and Nicolai Ouroussoff of the New York Times for his well-honed architectural criticism, highlighted by ambitious essays on the burst of architectural projects in oil-rich Middle East countries.
Finalists: Jonathan Gold of the LA Weekly for his delightful, authoritative restaurant reviews, escorting readers through a city's diverse food culture; and Nicolai Ouroussoff of The New York Times for his well-honed architectural criticism, highlighted by ambitious essays on the burst of architectural projects in oil-rich Middle East countries.
In his ambitious opening essay, "The Bleak Shall Inherit," an interview with the psychologist Julie Norem (author of "The Positive Power of Negative Thinking") sets Rakoff off on an attempt to construct his case for the defensive pessimism (expecting the worst so one will never be disappointed) imbued in the nine essays that follow.
In most fiction, the war is between two or more characters — Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, say — whereas in the ambitious personal essay, there's just as much war, just as much "conflict," but it's within the breast, as it were, of the narrator/speaker/author.
With the exhibition comes a new book by Knausgaard, entitled So Much Longing on Such a Small Surface, an ambitious personal essay in which Knausgaard relates to Munch as one artist investigating the methods, goals, and intentions of another.
