The Lost Origins of the Essay is a really intriguing and dazzling project. I enjoyed the chronological ordering of the works, which even seemed to break down or was transmuted at the end, and the emphasis on work outside the USA, which I"m assuming is also due in part to the other volumes in this essay trilogy. Many of the works left me feeling dislocated and confused, in already such a strange time, and I am reminded of the power of language and what actually interests me in reading can be syntax and word choice itself and need not be wrapped in narrative or explicitly structured information.

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. ( )