Flashes of Essayism

Flashes of Essayism explores the essay as more than a literary form: it considers essayism as a dynamic mode of thinking, one that mediates between lived experience, reading, and imaginative creation. Bridging literary criticism with a personal, exploratory writing practice, this dissertation rethinks fictional texts potential to generate what I call “flashes of essayism”—moments of heightened insight, rupture, or reflection in the reader. Through close readings of authors such as Borges, Sebald, García Márquez, and Saramago, I trace how essayism interrupts, refracts, and reshapes our experience of reading and writing. Ultimately, the project argues for essayism as a mode of encounter—one that transforms how we read, how we write, and how we make meaning from the flux of experience.