Zugl. leicht überarb. Fassung von: Göttingen, Univ., Diss., 2007

In this essay I am trying to intertwine personal memories with reflections on the essay as a genre, exploring the subjective consistency of objective realities. The question pursued is this: How can a mutually enriching relationship between academia and creative writing be envisaged? The essayistic tradition can be seen as an answer to an increasingly specialised professionalism in academia which is in danger of alienating itself from its social, political and sensory contexts. These contexts produce the very uncertainties which are at the core of the essay’s concern.

The essay is here seen as a genre of the in-between. Commonly not conceived as a proper academic genre, its methods seemingly not as decent as the academic discourse, the essay justifies itself precisely by questioning the dubious order of the latter, as Adorno outlined. The essay seems to be understood adequately if characterized by its rhetoric or its language rather than defined by generic terms. Being both object-oriented and subject-oriented, in accepting no end of the topic, in beginning somewhere in medias res, etc., the essay might be a medium of representation of life itself.