The CounterText review : Brian Dillon’s Essayism and the return of the essay

Abstract

Essayism. By Brian Dillon (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2017) 152pp. £10.99 French paperback with flaps. The essay returns, again. It returns as a countertextual form in a post-literary ‘domain’ in which what has a ‘claim on the literary’ is, as Ivan Callus and James Corby put it, ‘more open and freer than ever’ (Callus and Corby 2015: v). It continues to loosen the elastic limits around

‘literature’, helping to accentuate the sense that we are witnessing ‘an expanded con- ception of literature’ (Callus and Corby 2017: 71). The expansion of literature in the

post-literary takes various forms, and involves, for instance, literature stretching its print-based canonised spaces further onto digital or electronic platforms and sites for performance. It involves Bob Dylan being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016. It also involves the non-fiction writer, Svetlana Alexievich, receiving the Prize in 2015 and in so doing becoming the first since Winston Churchill (in 1953) to receive the award while not being mostly known for one of the three main genres of literature. The post-literary includes the return of the essay as a countertextual form. Speaking at the 2017 Arts Foundation Creative Non-Fiction Award Ceremony, Marina Warner highlights a current interest in non-fiction writing, which, for her, marks the ‘return of an older, plural notion of literature’ that confounds the distinction between fiction and non-fiction.1 Implied in Warner’s claim is the idea that what Houman Barekat describes as the ‘recent glut’ of writing that ‘enlist[s] elements associated with Life-writing, philosophy and memoir’ into the domain of literary fiction is not entirely new but the re-adaptation of previously existing modulations of literature (Barekat 2017).