ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the essay will be described through what I call its democratic potential. It emerges from the interplay of the genre’s subjectivity, which can render every voice audible, and from its anti-systematic impetus, which leaves room for fragmentary, lacunary or erratic thoughts. Under subjectivity I will also subsume the dilettantish perspective of essays, whose spontaneity can bring to light insights that academic studies usually cannot yield. The literary critics and essayists who are referenced for these reflections include Theodor W. Adorno, Geoff Dyer, William Hazlitt, Michel de Montaigne, Claire DeObaldia, Susan Sontag and Peter Zima.
