The essay is a genre in literatureliterature
Literature is a type of art associated with Writing and language.
developed by montaignemontaigne
michel de montaigne created the essay. he was a big reader of seneca and plutarch. He quotes horace and virgil among others.
, himself inspired by seneca Private or Broken Links
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and plutarch Private or Broken Links
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, as well as francis baconfrancis bacon
francis bacon was an english statesmen who established modern science. He was influenced by aristotle.
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david solway says that writingwriting
an essay is a record of the self who wrote it.
taleb Private or Broken Links
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writes
By then I had written the first volume of the Incerto, Fooled by Randomness, a book that was practically impossible to publish. It was a continental style meditative essay and the Anglo Saxon world, in spite of their infatuation with Montaigne and Umberto Eco Private or Broken Links
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, were about five hundred years late to the genre. The official “subject” (an essay is not supposed to have such a constraint as a subject) was a random mixture of autobiography, philosophy (of probability), mathematics, inductive logic, musings on historical events and financial markets. It included parables with fictional characters, one of whom seemed to resemble me, which appeared to be confusing since I also had explicit autobiographical episodes. “Why are you confusing the reader with both Nero Tulip and yourself”, I was often asked by those who did not find the mixture too uncanny and continued reading the text. “What’s wrong with confusing the reader?” was my usual answer. The good thing about inserting “randomness” in the title is that it allowed me to write about anything that crossed my mind, given the ubiquity of chance and, worse, the lack of awareness of it. Not unexpectedly, the reaction of publishing houses had been unanimously dismissive: why would anyone mix finance, Solon, and Proust? And why these mathematical discussions?
Now I have no problem with focus and precision: I do not want my vacuum cleaner user manual to be a stream of consciousness. I had written a specialized treatise in mathematical finance, and was embarking on a career writing scientific papers, which must be as narrow as possible. But literature should not have explicit boundaries: the confines of the subject are internal and may remain elusive and hard to express in words. Nor should literature have institutions formalizing and commoditizing things. And I wanted to do my own version of what is called literature. Literature must be idiosyncratic.