The lyric essay is a hybrid form in creative nonfiction that focuses on rhythm and cadence as much as context, often employing poetic devices to create repetition and layered meanings.
Lyric
A brief subjective poem strongly marked by imagination, melody, and emotion, and creating a single, unified impression. (A Handbook to Literature)
Originally, a poem meant to be sung to the accompaniment of a lyre; now, any relatively short poem in which the speaker expresses his or her thoughts and feelings in the first person rather than recounting a narrative or portraying a dramatic situation. (Norton)
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Sources
The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind, and Brain, from Vienna 1900 to the Present. Eric Kandel.
A Handbook to Literature. William Harmon.
“Cogito et Histoire de la Folie.” Jacques Derrida.
Cognitive Neuropsychology Section, Laboratory of Brain and Cognition.
Eats Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation. Lynne Truss.
The Elements of Style. William Strunk.
New Oxford American Dictionary. Edited by Angus Stevenson and Christine A. Lindberg.
The Norton Anthology of World Literature. Martin Puchner, et al.
The Norton Introduction to Philosophy. Gideon Rosen and Alex Byrne.
Woe is I: The Grammarphobe’s Guide to Better English in Plain English. Patricia T. O’Conner
Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft. Janet Burroway, Elizabeth Stuckey-French & Ned Stuckey-French.
Writing the Other. Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward.
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