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The Lost Origins of the Essay
An expansive and exhilarating world tour of innovative nonfiction writing I think the reason we've never pinpointed the real beginning to this genre is because we've never agreed on what the genre even is. Do we read nonfiction in order to receive information, or do we read it to experience art? It's not very clear sometimes. This, then, is a book that tries to offer a clear I am here in search of art. I am here to track the origins of an alternative to commerce.
John D'Agata leaves no tablet unturned in his exploration of the roots of the essay. The Lost Origins of the Essay takes the reader from ancient Mesopotamia to classical Greece and Rome, from fifth-century Japan to nineteenth-century France, to modern Brazil, Germany, Barbados, and beyond. With brief and brilliant introductions to seminal works by Heraclitus, Sei Sho-nagon, Michel de Montaigne, Jonathan Swift, Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Duras, Octavio Paz, and more than forty other luminaries, D'Agata reexamines the international forebears of today's American nonfiction. This idiosyncratic collection makes a perfect historical companion to D'Agata's The Next American Essay, a touchstone among students and practitioners of the lyric essay.
John D'Agata leaves no tablet unturned in his exploration of the roots of the essay. The Lost Origins of the Essay takes the reader from ancient Mesopotamia to classical Greece and Rome, from fifth-century Japan to nineteenth-century France, to modern Brazil, Germany, Barbados, and beyond. With brief and brilliant introductions to seminal works by Heraclitus, Sei Sho-nagon, Michel de Montaigne, Jonathan Swift, Virginia Woolf, Marguerite Duras, Octavio Paz, and more than forty other luminaries, D'Agata reexamines the international forebears of today's American nonfiction. This idiosyncratic collection makes a perfect historical companion to D'Agata's The Next American Essay, a touchstone among students and practitioners of the lyric essay.
656 pages, Paperback
First published August 4, 2009
About the author
John D'Agata
13 books78 followersJohn D’Agata is the author of Halls of Fame: Essays, About a Mountain, and The Lifespan of a Fact, as well as the editor of the 3-volume series A New History of the Essay,, which includes the anthologies The Next American Essay, The Making of the American Essay, and The Lost Origins of the Essay. His work has been supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Howard Foundation Fellowship, an NEA Literature Fellowship, and a Lannan Foundation Fellowship. He holds a B.A. from Hobart College and two M.F.A.s from the University of Iowa, and recently his essays have appeared in ,i>The Believer, Harper's, Gulf Coast, and Conjunctions. John D’Agata lives in Iowa City with a dog named Boeing, and he teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa where he directs the graduate Nonfiction Writing Program.
Find out more at johndagata.com
Find out more at johndagata.com
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
September 10, 2015
How wonderful it would be to have a useful anthology of the essay. Phillip Lopate's "Art of the Personal Essay" is almost the only one in English. The problem here is not the selection, but the author's lack of a theoretical and historical perspective. The lack of theory shows in the editor's sometimes random comments on what might count as an essay; and the lack of history shows in his occasional obliviousness to the history of his own taste, his own position as the product of late twentieth-century North American liberal arts education. Ten examples:
1. Kenko's "Essays in Idleness" is presented as an example of "associative and irregular" writing, without any mention of its reception history in Japan (where it is not famous for those properties, which are given to other texts), or its troubled presentation of gender roles.
2. Petrarch's account of his walk up Mt. Ventou is marred by the author's own translation, which owes more to "McSweeney's" than to the fourteenth century (Petrarch says, "I was seized by a desire to go for it. To climb." What sense of Petrarch is enriched by that colloquialism? What supposed stuffiness is aired out?).
3. Bernardino de Sahaguin's dictionary is excerpted, creating a false and fortuitous sense of poetry. The dictionary was not meant to be expressive, of course; d'Agata's use of it descends from surrealism, and it would have been good to acknowledge that.
4. Francis Bacon is used to introduce the idea that an aphorism can be "very like a thesis": but why use Bacon to make this point? Why not theorize on aphorisms (since Bacon's theses are not aphorisms)? Why not use Rochefoucauld? If scholastic philosophic propositions can be aphorisms, and aphorisms can be theses, why not develop that as an historical argument?
5. Christopher Smart's verses on his cat are connected, by a weird historical lineage, to Khlebnikov, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Kathy Acker, and Joe Wenderoth. It's a dumbfounding genealogy, which can only make sense as a late twentieth-century sense of Smart, in which he is plucked from his saner contemporaries and pressed into use to justify completely different and more contemporary experiments.
6. The excerpt from Blake's "Marriage of Heaven and Hell" makes me wonder if d'Agata is listening to the content of his own selections, or choosing only for form, rhetoric, and music. I wonder because the content of this selection, if it is read alongside Bacon's text, proposes an anti-clerical Enlightenment: but does the editor care?
7. On the other hand, the selection from Artaud is fundamentally hysterical, but d'Agata doesn't seem to notice; it's as if hysteria doesn't matter provided form is interesting.
8. Michel Butor's wonderful and very French speculation on Egypt, which I hadn't read before, is wonderfully translated by Lydia Davis: and it stands out, too, because it proposes itself as an essay. Any why doesn't it matter that some of the texts in this anthology know themselves to be essays and others don't?
9. A long excerpt of a text by Kamau Braithwaite is presented as an example of an illocutionary (performative) text. But why Braithwaite? Why not Vachel Lindsay or Allen Ginzberg? Why reach so far for performative writing, and why not justify that reach?
10. The book ends with an epilogue by John Berger. It's lovely: but why Berger, once again? Why is he the model for so many people in academia interested in writing, when they themselves don't write like him? What does he have to say about essays? It's an opaque ending to an undertheorized, under-historicized book.
The controversy about D'Agata's book "The Lifespan of a Fact" (2012) and the two negative reviews of his position in the New York Times (February 26, 2012, in the magazine and in the book review) make good sense in relation to his lack of awareness of his historical position. In "The Lifespan of a Fact," he shows he has an unmodulated Romantic notion of the relation between inspiration and truth -- a notion he could have modified with better historical understanding.
1. Kenko's "Essays in Idleness" is presented as an example of "associative and irregular" writing, without any mention of its reception history in Japan (where it is not famous for those properties, which are given to other texts), or its troubled presentation of gender roles.
2. Petrarch's account of his walk up Mt. Ventou is marred by the author's own translation, which owes more to "McSweeney's" than to the fourteenth century (Petrarch says, "I was seized by a desire to go for it. To climb." What sense of Petrarch is enriched by that colloquialism? What supposed stuffiness is aired out?).
3. Bernardino de Sahaguin's dictionary is excerpted, creating a false and fortuitous sense of poetry. The dictionary was not meant to be expressive, of course; d'Agata's use of it descends from surrealism, and it would have been good to acknowledge that.
4. Francis Bacon is used to introduce the idea that an aphorism can be "very like a thesis": but why use Bacon to make this point? Why not theorize on aphorisms (since Bacon's theses are not aphorisms)? Why not use Rochefoucauld? If scholastic philosophic propositions can be aphorisms, and aphorisms can be theses, why not develop that as an historical argument?
5. Christopher Smart's verses on his cat are connected, by a weird historical lineage, to Khlebnikov, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Kathy Acker, and Joe Wenderoth. It's a dumbfounding genealogy, which can only make sense as a late twentieth-century sense of Smart, in which he is plucked from his saner contemporaries and pressed into use to justify completely different and more contemporary experiments.
6. The excerpt from Blake's "Marriage of Heaven and Hell" makes me wonder if d'Agata is listening to the content of his own selections, or choosing only for form, rhetoric, and music. I wonder because the content of this selection, if it is read alongside Bacon's text, proposes an anti-clerical Enlightenment: but does the editor care?
7. On the other hand, the selection from Artaud is fundamentally hysterical, but d'Agata doesn't seem to notice; it's as if hysteria doesn't matter provided form is interesting.
8. Michel Butor's wonderful and very French speculation on Egypt, which I hadn't read before, is wonderfully translated by Lydia Davis: and it stands out, too, because it proposes itself as an essay. Any why doesn't it matter that some of the texts in this anthology know themselves to be essays and others don't?
9. A long excerpt of a text by Kamau Braithwaite is presented as an example of an illocutionary (performative) text. But why Braithwaite? Why not Vachel Lindsay or Allen Ginzberg? Why reach so far for performative writing, and why not justify that reach?
10. The book ends with an epilogue by John Berger. It's lovely: but why Berger, once again? Why is he the model for so many people in academia interested in writing, when they themselves don't write like him? What does he have to say about essays? It's an opaque ending to an undertheorized, under-historicized book.
The controversy about D'Agata's book "The Lifespan of a Fact" (2012) and the two negative reviews of his position in the New York Times (February 26, 2012, in the magazine and in the book review) make good sense in relation to his lack of awareness of his historical position. In "The Lifespan of a Fact," he shows he has an unmodulated Romantic notion of the relation between inspiration and truth -- a notion he could have modified with better historical understanding.
June 17, 2010
An satisfying anthology of some of the best writings- not too strictly designed essays, but musings and expositions- of Eastern and Western civilization, ranging temporally from Ziusudra of Sumer to Beckett. D'Agata prefaces each essay with a short, illustrative intro as he seeks to share what he believes to be "the origins of an alternative to commerce". Aha! The essay, a way of life!
Oh yes, dear reader: the essay is alive. There is no reason to despair.
- Woolf
Oh yes, dear reader: the essay is alive. There is no reason to despair.
- Woolf
October 28, 2009
Sometimes in rating the books I read I wish I had an extra star to give. With this collection, as with Next American Essay, I wish I had five extra stars to give.
I really can't imagine how it was I thought about the essay before John D'Agata.
I can't imagine an anthologizer I'd trust more than I trust him.
I can't wait for that third one to come out.
I really can't imagine how it was I thought about the essay before John D'Agata.
I can't imagine an anthologizer I'd trust more than I trust him.
I can't wait for that third one to come out.
May 5, 2025
I have such mixed feelings. On the one hand, I enjoy just how many essays this anthology has brought to my attention, and how "The Lost Origins of the Essay" has forced me to question the definition of an "essay." I love that this book has expanded my breadth of knowledge and gnawed away at the edges of the constraining way I used to view an essay. This book is also the perfect size for a class, which is what I read this for.
But on the other hand, the editor has made so many factual errors with his introductions that we spent the beginning of every class correcting him. Some of these errors are a bit minimal--just a missed note that would have been important to know, like how the selection from Kenko was actually from a larger piece--but some were so huge that the class unanimously agreed that it completely reshaped the author and the author's work in our minds. Montaigne did not spend his whole life in a tower. Duras did not read her essay for forty-two minutes over blankness. For goodness sake, you can literally find it on YouTube. This could have been fact checked so easily. And yet D'Agata chose to portray Duras in this way, which shaped the way we viewed her essay. The editor also completely misconstrued "The Pillow Book" and only chose passages of relevance to his "mono no aware" interpretation, instead of mentioning anything to do with "wokashi," which is the more accurate reading. I wouldn't have even known this had I not had a research project associated with this work for this class, which makes me wonder just how many other errors this book has that my professor was just unaware of.
While I do love this selection of essays, and while I am grateful for this book's existence, the amount of willful errors in this anthology drastically reduced my enjoyment, colored my perception of these essays in an inaccurate light, and is downright deceptive.
But on the other hand, the editor has made so many factual errors with his introductions that we spent the beginning of every class correcting him. Some of these errors are a bit minimal--just a missed note that would have been important to know, like how the selection from Kenko was actually from a larger piece--but some were so huge that the class unanimously agreed that it completely reshaped the author and the author's work in our minds. Montaigne did not spend his whole life in a tower. Duras did not read her essay for forty-two minutes over blankness. For goodness sake, you can literally find it on YouTube. This could have been fact checked so easily. And yet D'Agata chose to portray Duras in this way, which shaped the way we viewed her essay. The editor also completely misconstrued "The Pillow Book" and only chose passages of relevance to his "mono no aware" interpretation, instead of mentioning anything to do with "wokashi," which is the more accurate reading. I wouldn't have even known this had I not had a research project associated with this work for this class, which makes me wonder just how many other errors this book has that my professor was just unaware of.
While I do love this selection of essays, and while I am grateful for this book's existence, the amount of willful errors in this anthology drastically reduced my enjoyment, colored my perception of these essays in an inaccurate light, and is downright deceptive.
April 18, 2010
Not as good as the first in this series, The Next American Essay, but maybe just because that one seemed so groundbreaking to me. Still good, though he seems to be ambling back over a lot of the same territory. In any event, D'Agata's insights on the genre of nonfiction and the essay as form in this collection are as valuable, to me, as the essays themselves. I hear there will be three in total. I will definitely read the third book as well, interested in seeing where he can take the discussion from here.
November 17, 2010
I haven't read every page of this behemoth, but I'll mark it as such here anyway. I love picking this up and poring through sections at random. The other day I read a Mario Vargas Llosa essay praising Julio Cortázar, and remembered Cortázar had a great essay/short story here. You could do this with several writers; the editor's selected many that I've heard of, but never read.
D'Agata's a true believer and a proselytizer for the best kind of religion: that elusive, age-old form called "the essay." Don't be put off by the book's heft; think of it as an ideal companion for years of reading.
D'Agata's a true believer and a proselytizer for the best kind of religion: that elusive, age-old form called "the essay." Don't be put off by the book's heft; think of it as an ideal companion for years of reading.
June 30, 2017
This is the second edition in a set of books about nonfiction that is very different from your average nonfiction writing.
December 11, 2022
A helpful connection and interesting insight into the art and history of the essay.
April 9, 2026
Read for evil evil class :( not an essay fan
April 23, 2026
This was a great collection, however some of the introductions to authors are inaccurate.
April 23, 2026
Some introductions are misleading for the authors
December 23, 2012
I'm a big fan of both of D'Agata's essay anthologies. It's possible to earn an MFA in creative writing, including numerous classes in creative non-fiction without stumbling across anything close to the variety that D'Agata provides in a single anthology. I'd also recommend the Touchstone Anthology of Creative non-fiction, which a professor of mine had us all read in graduate school. Anyhow, reading D'Agata's selections is instructive for you readers and writers. It provides a new way at looking at essays, or rather, the continuation of a rather long tradition that may have been briefly subsumed in the wave of writing that followed the "New Journalists." I'm a fan of New Journalism, an avid reader of David Foster Wallace, but I still found much to recommend in this collection of essays that spans from BCE to the 1970's.
Are all of the selections wonderful? No. I'd say that the quality of the essays in this collection is a bit below what I read in The Next American Essay. However, the scope of time and culture covered is impressive. For D'Agata, it isn't important to put each piece in its perfect cultural context and explain exactly how it was received during that time period. Ie, he is not reading these pieces as an ethnographer or as a modern scholar of English literature studies, who take nearly all the fun out of everything, but as a lover of literature. I can't fault him for that. In fact, it's rather inspiring.
Anyhow, I'd recommend that professors of non-fiction courses take a look at D'Agata's two anthologies along with the Touchstone Anthology and Lopate's "The Art of the Personal Essay" when constructing a course. At least in my experience, students could use some more training in crossing over the wall of the self into a piece that is written for outside world, or at least makes an attempt at it, or, barring that, art.
The Best of the Best
On Some Verses of Virgil-Obligatory Montaigne, however, it's an unavoidable because he's just so damn good. He gives readers and writers a window into how one should approach an essay: wide ranging, free thinking, willing to change one's mind, reliant upon others without using them as an edifice for an argument, rather as a jumping off point for an argument. In the end all of his essays wind up being an examination of how one is to live.
The English Mail-Coach-Borges is always rattling on about how great Thomas De Quincey is, and I kept wondering who the hell he was prattling on about. Anyhow, De Quincey's three part piece about the mail coach system is pretty damn amazing. It manages to pack humor, history, intrigue, romance, death, and eventually lyricism into an essay about the coach system. All hail intelligent men.
The Instruction Manual by Julio Cortazar-It's a practical guide on how to do things like climb stairs, sing, and he gives you examples of how to be afraid. It's great writing mixed with the fun of new forms. Loved it.
Egypt by Michel Butor-This is an excellent essay. It is mostly a travel essay, but it slides nicely into a discussion of death and differences between eastern and western cultures. It mixes the intellectual with the personal and ends on a note that sent shivers up my spine.
He and I by Natalia Ginzburg-This is the reason that I don't like to read. She wrote an essay that I wish I'd thought of, and she's done it so damn well that it's not even worth considering something similar. She tells of the many differences between her and her spouse ending on the tale of their first meeting. Shivers again.
Other pieces that are worth a look if you have time to google it:
The Death of the Moth by Virginia Woolf-Admittedly, I hadn't read any of Woolf's non-fiction before this essay. She is a virtuoso writer.
The Pebble by Francis Ponge-It's a fascinating journey to see how far Ponge is able to take you just by considering a pebble.
Before Sleep by Octavio Paz-Not bad for a poet.
The I-Singer of Universong-This essay by Velimir Khlebinkov is exactly what you would want a lyric essay to read like. The prose makes you feel as if you are gliding above something beautiful rather than walking through it. It's rare that prose can sustain that level. This piece does.
Metaphysics has always struck me as a prolonged form of latent insanity-Admittedly, Fernando Pessoa had me with the title. However the arguments that follow, many based in linguistic oddities make for a fascinating read.
Are all of the selections wonderful? No. I'd say that the quality of the essays in this collection is a bit below what I read in The Next American Essay. However, the scope of time and culture covered is impressive. For D'Agata, it isn't important to put each piece in its perfect cultural context and explain exactly how it was received during that time period. Ie, he is not reading these pieces as an ethnographer or as a modern scholar of English literature studies, who take nearly all the fun out of everything, but as a lover of literature. I can't fault him for that. In fact, it's rather inspiring.
Anyhow, I'd recommend that professors of non-fiction courses take a look at D'Agata's two anthologies along with the Touchstone Anthology and Lopate's "The Art of the Personal Essay" when constructing a course. At least in my experience, students could use some more training in crossing over the wall of the self into a piece that is written for outside world, or at least makes an attempt at it, or, barring that, art.
The Best of the Best
On Some Verses of Virgil-Obligatory Montaigne, however, it's an unavoidable because he's just so damn good. He gives readers and writers a window into how one should approach an essay: wide ranging, free thinking, willing to change one's mind, reliant upon others without using them as an edifice for an argument, rather as a jumping off point for an argument. In the end all of his essays wind up being an examination of how one is to live.
The English Mail-Coach-Borges is always rattling on about how great Thomas De Quincey is, and I kept wondering who the hell he was prattling on about. Anyhow, De Quincey's three part piece about the mail coach system is pretty damn amazing. It manages to pack humor, history, intrigue, romance, death, and eventually lyricism into an essay about the coach system. All hail intelligent men.
The Instruction Manual by Julio Cortazar-It's a practical guide on how to do things like climb stairs, sing, and he gives you examples of how to be afraid. It's great writing mixed with the fun of new forms. Loved it.
Egypt by Michel Butor-This is an excellent essay. It is mostly a travel essay, but it slides nicely into a discussion of death and differences between eastern and western cultures. It mixes the intellectual with the personal and ends on a note that sent shivers up my spine.
He and I by Natalia Ginzburg-This is the reason that I don't like to read. She wrote an essay that I wish I'd thought of, and she's done it so damn well that it's not even worth considering something similar. She tells of the many differences between her and her spouse ending on the tale of their first meeting. Shivers again.
Other pieces that are worth a look if you have time to google it:
The Death of the Moth by Virginia Woolf-Admittedly, I hadn't read any of Woolf's non-fiction before this essay. She is a virtuoso writer.
The Pebble by Francis Ponge-It's a fascinating journey to see how far Ponge is able to take you just by considering a pebble.
Before Sleep by Octavio Paz-Not bad for a poet.
The I-Singer of Universong-This essay by Velimir Khlebinkov is exactly what you would want a lyric essay to read like. The prose makes you feel as if you are gliding above something beautiful rather than walking through it. It's rare that prose can sustain that level. This piece does.
Metaphysics has always struck me as a prolonged form of latent insanity-Admittedly, Fernando Pessoa had me with the title. However the arguments that follow, many based in linguistic oddities make for a fascinating read.
May 5, 2018
I think I prefer D'Agata's "The Next American Essay."
This one is bigger--or just seems that way--with a wider expanse, covering all of history until the 1970s (when "The Next American" starts). It's weirder, too.
D'Agata's project remains the same: to show the diversity of the essay form, breaking it from what it is accepted as today: a (relatively) short piece with the main goal of communicating information. D'Agata wants more lyrical essays, ones that do not concern themselves primarily with transmitting data--not that they should be pure fiction, but that they can focus on experience and emotion.
The wider ambit allows for some interesting essays here, but also what felt like a lot of extraneous ones--I got the feeling his eye was more on the textbook market. And his point has been made over and over again, though, admittedly, it remains on the fringe.
It's a good book to have on hand, not to read straight through but to dip into now and then, and discover entirely new approaches to the written word.
This one is bigger--or just seems that way--with a wider expanse, covering all of history until the 1970s (when "The Next American" starts). It's weirder, too.
D'Agata's project remains the same: to show the diversity of the essay form, breaking it from what it is accepted as today: a (relatively) short piece with the main goal of communicating information. D'Agata wants more lyrical essays, ones that do not concern themselves primarily with transmitting data--not that they should be pure fiction, but that they can focus on experience and emotion.
The wider ambit allows for some interesting essays here, but also what felt like a lot of extraneous ones--I got the feeling his eye was more on the textbook market. And his point has been made over and over again, though, admittedly, it remains on the fringe.
It's a good book to have on hand, not to read straight through but to dip into now and then, and discover entirely new approaches to the written word.
October 13, 2009
oh yeah, d'agata is the real thing, a great essayist in his own right and a great teacher too. this volume has it all, from seneca to paz to beckett and duras. this is vol 2 of proposed 3 vols. collect all 3! "next american essay" is vol 1.
Read
November 2, 2010Didn't really flip my switch. I'll have to try it again later.
January 3, 2015
My review of this frustrating but pleasingly inclusive anthology:
http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/boo...
http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/boo...
June 16, 2024
Excellent resource.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews