1. The Essay The Essays by Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) from the French essais meaning “to attempt” An assay is an “examination and determination as to characteristics (as weight, measure, or quality)”. In science, it is an “analysis (as of an ore or drug) to determine the presence, absence, or quantity of one or more components”. (Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary)

2. “I take the first subject that chance offers. They are all equally good to me. And I never plan to develop them completely. For I do not see the whole of anything.... Of a hundred members and faces that each thing has, I take one, sometimes only to lick it, sometimes to brush the surface, sometimes to pinch it to the bone. I give it a stab, not as wide but as deep as I know how. And most often I like to take them from some unaccustomed point of view.” -Michel de Montaigne

3. “We get out of essays everything a prancing human voice is capable of. Instruction. The bliss of eloquence deployed for its own sake. Moral correction. Entertainment. Deepening of feeling. Models of intelligence. Intelligence is a literary virtue, not just an energy or aptitude given literary clothing. It is hard to imagine an important essay that is not, first of all, a display of intelligence.” -Susan Sontag (1933-2004)

4. “An essay is not a scientific document. It can be serendipitous or domestic, satire or testimony, tongue-in-cheek or wail of grief. Mulched perhaps in its own contradictions, it promises no sure objectivity, just the condiment of opinion on a base of observation and sometimes such leaps of illogic or superlogic that they may work a bit like magic realism in a novel: namely to simulate the mind's own processes in a murkey and incongruous world. More than being instructive, as a magazine article is, an essay has a slant, a seasoned personality behind it that ought to weather well. Even if we think the author is telling the earth is flat, we might want to listen to him elaborate upon the fringes of his premise because the bristle of his narrative and what he's seen intrigues us. He has a cutting edge, yet balance too. A given body of information is going to be eclipsed, but what lives in art is spirit, not factuality, and we respond to Montaigne's human touch despite four centuries of technological and social change.” -Edward Hoagland (b. 1932)

5. Read and annotate “My Zombie, Myself” by Chuck Klosterman In which rhetorical modes does Klosterman write? Why? Describe his tone and his argument? How do his tone and subject matter obscure his seriousness and intellect? Do you agree with his argument on popular culture? Respond to and elaborate on his essay.