are blogs more essayistic than essays?

Who's your Daddy?

Martin Gruner Larsen titled his Master’s thesis “Text, Thought, Time: The Weblog As Essayistic Process.”  In an abbreviated version of his thesis that he posted to his blog, Larsen names his project as an “attempt to create a conceptual vocabulary for describing the weblog as a literary form”, and points to essay theory as the fulcrum that enabled him to do this.  After reading Montaigne’s Essais, he realized that they had a lot in common with blogs:

the focus on process; the intellectual restlessness; the love of quotation, of other texts, of the randomness of things read coming together and the verbal and intellectual playfulness – these were all superficial qualities shared by blogs and the essay… qualities [that] actually signalled a deeper relationship of methodology, composition and structure which I wanted to explore and use to develop a theoretical vocabulary to describe blogs as literary entities and then use in practice to analyse and criticise some blogs.

These very qualities that Larsen points out are also the qualities that I try to encourage in my students’ writing.  I am drawn to blogs as a pedagogical tool because I think that, by their very nature, they ask students to begin over and over and over again, to “essai” on a certain topic with a series of posts.   Because of this, blogs might push students to write prose that is more essayistic , rather than merely expository.  Students can approach their topic from various diffferent angles, and evolve the topic as they go.  Blogs are not a finished product, but rather a work in progress, which pushes students to think of knowledge as ever-emerging, ever-changing.  And, of course, blogs are a more public form of writing than essays written to a teacher only.

Compositionist J. Elizabeth Clark argues in “The Digital Imperative: Making the case for a 21st Century Pedagogy”, that

“In our nascent digital culture, the traditional essayistic literacy that still dominates composition classes is outmoded and needs to be replaced by an intentional pedagogy of digital rhetoric that emphasizes the civic importance of education, the cultural and social imperative of ‘the now,’ and the ‘cultural software’ that engages students in the interactivity, collaboration, ownership, authority, and malleability of texts.”

While I agree that these aims of a “pedagogy of digital rhetoric” are a good thing, I take issue with the term “traditional essayistic literacy” that Clark uses as a foil for a pedagogy of digital rhetoric.  She does not define what she means by “traditional essayistic literacy,” but instead leaves it up to the reader to fill in that gap for his/herself.  I have seen this term “essayistic litearcy” used before by compositioninsts, to what I believe is ill effect, given the qualities of the essay that I find so epistemologically powerful, which Larsen points out: “the focus on process; the intellectual restlessness; the love of quotation, of other texts, of the randomness of things read coming together and the verbal and intellectual playfulness.”  This is the kind of writing, and habits of thought that I want my students to engage in.

Clark refers elsewhere in her article to Ally, as student who was

“constrained by a rigid understanding of the five-paragraph essay… hamstrung by the form and unable to fully develop her essays” and who instead “attempted to make everything fit into five-paragraphs and ended up with only the shell of what promised to be a much longer essay.  She thought of writing as a performance for the teacher, but not as something that had a significant role in her own life.”

This shows that, by “traditional essayistic literacy,”  Clark might mean writing reminiscent to the five-paragraph essay,  rather than the type of essay that Larsen speaks of.  What seems problematic is that the term “essayistic” is getting conflated with mind-rotting, standardized school writing, rather than the vibrant sort of essayism that Larsen describes as inherent to the blog as a literary form.   I think that compositionists need to take heed not to cross these definitional wires of the essay.  The Essay, as it has traditionally been known since as far back as Montaigne, should be something that we rescue from traditional school writing, rather than simply toss aside in our rush towards the new frontier of a “pedagogy of digital rhetoric.”