Rolf Hughes
September 2008
Workshop 1:
History of the essay
Aristotle: Poetics: Longinus: On the Sublime; Plutarch: Moralia; Seneca: Moral Essays.
John Dryden: An Essay of Dramatic Poesy; Michel de Montaigne: The Essays; Richard Steele & Joseph Addison Spectator (1711-12, 1714); Dr. Samuel Johnson Lives of the English Poets (1779-81); Denis Diderot; Voltaire; Rousseau; Charles Lamb’s Essays of Elia; William Hazlitt; Leigh Hunt; Matthew Arnold; Thomas Carlyle; Oscar Wilde; F.R. Leavis; Virginia Woolf; Henry James; Lionel Trilling; publications including Edinburgh Magazine and Review (1773-76), Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Quarterly Review, Scrutiny (1932-53), the Paris Review (1953–), the Times Literary Supplement (1902–), the New Yorker ((1925–), contemporary blogs.
Workshop 2
Forms of criticism
Why is there Genre and not Literature instead?
Creative and Critical Writing
Forms of the essay include: The five-paragraph essay; Academic essays; Descriptive; Narrative; Exemplification; Comparison and Contrast; Cause and Effect; Classification and division; Definition; Dialectic; Dialogue. See also Non-literary essays in Visual Arts, Music, Film, Photography etc.
Related forms (see photocopies): Aphorism; Character Sketch; Dialogue; Journal; Letter; Personal Essay; Philosophical Essay; Propaganda.
Workshop 3
After criticism?
The site(s) of writing
Discussion of assignment responses
"I try to describe with love what I love. My secret ambition is to pierce through the veil: think about a work and then not just describe it but arrive at something, an underlying principal or an underlying emotion and then say what the work's true value and beauty really is." Joan Acocella
Recommended reading
- Baird, George. “Criticality and Its Discontents,” Harvard Design Magazine, 2004.
- Butt, Gavin. After Criticism: New Responses to Art and Performance, Blackwell: Malden & Oxford, 2005.
- Critical Inquiry
- Eagleton, Terry. After Theory, Penguin: London, 2004.
- Hays, K. Michael. “Critical Architecture: Between Culture and Form,” Perspecta 21: The Yale Architectural Journal, 1984. pp. 14-29.
- Martin, Reinhold. Critical of What?
- Somol, Robert & Whiting, Sarah. “Notes around the Doppler Effect and other Moods of Modernism,” Perspecta 33: The Yale Architectural Journal, 2002.
- Sontag, Susan. ‘Against Interpretation’ and ‘Notes on Camp’, in A Susan Sontag Reader, Intro. Elizabeth Hardwick, Penguin: London, 1983.
- Speaks, Michael. “Design Intelligence, Part I: Introduction,” A+U, 2002.
About Me
- Rolf Hughes
- Writer & critic; Guest Professor in Theory and Practice-Based Research at the Department of Interdisciplinary Studies at Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design, Stockholm; Senior Professor in Research Design at the Sint-Lucas School of Architecture, Brussels & Ghent; Senior Researcher at the Royal Institute of Technology, School of Architecture, Stockholm.