Word: essay
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...more precise definition of the breed came naturally enough from Chandler, the American-born, British-educated creator of Philip Marlowe, the detective who got more similes to the mile than anybody before or since ("as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food"). Laid down in his essay The Simple Art of Murder, Chandler's description of the fictional American detective has the power of an ecclesiastical oath: "He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people...
That great leveling effect, however, has not made pop any more palatable to old-line intellectuals. The contempt was, until rather recently, obligatory and absolute. Mandarin ill will reached a peak in "Masscult & Midcult," Dwight Macdonald's acutely cranky 1960 essay. "Masscult is bad in a new way," he wrote, because "it doesn't even have the theoretical possibility of being good." A pernicious "Gresham's law" was inevitable: good art would be driven out by the bad -- by pop. Another ferocious holdout is William Gass, a very intelligent critic whose opaque, self-conscious novels are the sort of fiction...
...notch educations. I will remember with gratitude those few epiphanic moments of intellectual breakthrough; times when teachers have actually challenged me to think deeper about the subject at hand. A section leader in English who critiqued each of my arguments and wrote a full page of comments at essay's end reminded me of high school, when our ideas were taken seriously and not reduced to a mere checklist of buzzwords and cliches...
Even within the seemingly strict confines ofthe written essay, though, there is ample room forcreativity and the personal touch. Take a cursory1
Roughly 70 percent of tomorrow's graduating seniors will enter into the company of educated men and women with some sort of honors or another. However, honors requirements vary depending on the department. Most laurel-seekers, though, follow the well-worn, traditional path of the written essay. In what is supposed to be a well-written, well-argued essay of anywhere from 50 to 150 pages, theses writers try to sum up their four-year sojourn inside ivy-covered Har- vard through an in depth exploration of sometopic of their choice...