Abstract

My dissertation traces the emergence of the essay as a literary genre in the early modern period and specifically the development in this genre of an identifiably "modern" discourse of subjectivity. I argue that the essay served an essentially heuristic function through which the emergence of this radically unlimited genre in the seventeenth century can be better understood. Using contemporary philosophical theories of epochal change and the development of our notion of the Self, such as those put forward by Hans Blumenberg and Charles Taylor, I trace the development of the genre and its instantiation of a discursive space in which diverse authors could theorize the socio-historical, epistemological, and cultural phenomena that have come to be seen as the conditions of Modernity. I show how essayists such as Montaigne and Bacon devised various strategies to negotiate a newly realized concept of their historical position and the need for an unrestricted rhetorical form through which to explore the implications for the figure of Self. ;The concept of the essay as it was invented by Montaigne remains the genre's most striking feature--namely, its critical, personal, tentative and non-teleological character. In terms of subjectivity, the essay is primarily a genre of the independent mind trying itself against possible states of being or perceptions. This makes it explorative and formative simultaneously, both in epistemology and morality , and ultimately in the desire of the easayist to seek connections between science and conduct, connections that neither received authority nor merely ornamental rhetoric can provide. A different style of thinking--a different rhetoric--is required and so a different genre. The first is the Montaignian tradition of the familiar or personal essay, which I refer to as the subjective mode. The second tradition is the less overtly personal or aphoristic essay we receive from Bacon, which I call the objective mode. My focus then, is on the tentative and various categories of Self that emerged in the works of the early modern essayists as necessary components in the private and civil discourse of subjectivity