A Eulogy for Nigger and Other Essays E-Book

Josh Cohen

• Herausgeber: Notting Hill Editions
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

This collection brings together the six international winners of the Notting Hill Editions £20,000 Essay Prize. From the coolly analytical to the impassioned winning entry 'A Eulogy for Nigger', these essays showcase the dazzling literary range of the form.

Leseprobe

‘The word essay is an invitation to try – regardless of the subject – to state facts with not only accuracy but irony; to not only express ideas but show those ideas developing; to argue not only with logic but with narrative; to do it all at the same time; to, above all, say what needs to be said.’

– David Bradley

‘The essay hearkens back to the very root of the word essayer. It involves trying, sometimes failing, but always exploring.’ – Jennifer Kabat

‘By freeing the mind to wander aimlessly, the essay can attain an intricacy and precision that eludes more linear forms. It discovers unsuspected affinities and connections between disparate phenomena only because it isn’t trying toohard to find them.’ – Josh Cohen

A EULOGY FOR NIGGER

AND OTHER ESSAYS

THE SECOND NOTTING HILL EDITiONS ESSAY PRIZE WINNERS

Foreword by Adam Mars-Jones

Contents

– Title Page –– Foreword by Adam Mars-Jones –DAVID BRADLEY– A Eulogy for Nigger –JENNIFER KABAT– The Rainmakers’ Flood –JOSH COHEN– The Incurious Rabbit –JOHANNA MÖHRING– Guts –GARRY COOPER– Hope at the Edge –KATE MCLOUGHLIN– The Great War and Modern Memory Revisited –– Note on Contributors –– Copyright –

Adam Mars-Jones

– Foreword –

Chairing a panel discussion on the essay at Kings Place earlier this year, I suggested (to start some hares) that this was the dominant literary form of our age, since a blog is a sort of essay, and so is a review, and so are newspaper columns. Obituaries, editorials, essays all. Michael Ignatieff, on my right, spoke up for a stricter, more classical definition of what an essay should be, saying that none of the forms of writing I had mentioned qualified in his eyes – and as the winner of the 2013 Prize he had authority, and to spare. Phillip Lopate on my left made claims for the tradition of the personal essay, not easily distinguishable from memoir and sometimes fiercely confessional, which he sees as more American than British.

Part of the essay’s vitality is its openness to hybridisation. Essays can share a border with journalism, with philosophy, with aesthetics, with travel writing. As anybody who has read E. B. White’s ‘Farewell My Lovely!’ will know, it can even have elements in common with the consumer review. White’s essay, published in 1936, pays tribute to the virtues and foibles of the Model T Ford, and gives a strong sense of the vehicle’s personality. If it strikes you as odd to imagine a machine as having a personality then you have perhaps forgotten passages like this:

The trick was to leave the ignition switch off, proceed to the animal’s head, pull the choke (which was a little wire protruding through the radiator), and give the crank two or three nonchalant upward lifts. Then, whistling as though thinking about something else, you would saunter back to the driver’s cabin, turn the ignition on, return to the crank, and this time, catching it on the down stroke, give it a quick spin with plenty of That. If this procedure was followed, the engine almost always responded – first with a few scattered explosions, then with a tumultuous gunfire, which you checked by racing around to the driver’s seat and retarding the throttle. Often, if the emergency brake hadn’t been pulled all the way back, the car advanced on you the instant the first explosion occurred and you would hold it back by leaning your weight against it. I can still feel my old Ford nuzzling me at the curb, as though looking for an apple in my pocket.

If What Car? was more like that I’d subscribe.

The three of us on the panel at Kings Place were judges of this year’s award, joined in our deliberations by Eileen Battersby and Raymond Tallis, though deliberations is a misleadingly solemn word for a lively process. There were also readers whose job was to prepare a long list. In a fit of self-importance (what’s the point of being a chairman of judges if you can’t throw your weight around?) I proposed to circulate some criteria to help them. They should be on the lookout for something open-ended and undogmatic, enquiries in the spirit of Montaigne’s motto – Que sais-je? – from writers who understand that what matters is not just what we see but how we see it, so that a straight oar looks bent in the water (the example, again, is Montaigne’s). They would take an idea for a walk just to see where they ended up … but then, with the return of common sense, I realised that it was silly to be dogmatising about the importance of being undogmatic.

The surprise of this year’s submissions, for me and perhaps for other judges also, was the presence of strong emotion, sometimes raw and sometimes shrewdly processed, in a number of successful entries, though the essay is assumed to be a temperate literary form, aspiring to balance and synthesis rather than anything more impassioned. This is true above all of the winning essay, which featured on every judge’s shortlist, and delivers a thoroughly disconcerting reading experience, richly mischievous, subtle in its anger.

David Bradley

– A Eulogy for Nigger –

DETROIT. Hundreds of onlookers cheered … as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People put to rest a long-standing expression of racism by holding a public burial for the N-word … Two Percheron horses pulled a pine box adorned with … a black ribbon printed with a derivation of the word. The coffin is to be placed at historically black Detroit Memorial Park Cemetery.