Practice question · True or false
Montaigne’s digressions are best understood as a failure to organise his material.
Hints
- Ask whether the wandering is consistent enough to be accidental.
- An essay on coaches reaching the New World is doing something deliberate.
Show the answer
False
Why
False. The digression is a claim about how thought actually moves. Montaigne follows an association because the mind does, and the resulting shape is the argument, a tidily organised essay would assert a control over thinking that he denies having.
Practise Montaigne’s Essais: Inventing a Form to Think In
The app has 3 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Literature I is free to start.
More questions on Montaigne’s Essais: Inventing a Form to Think In
- Montaigne revised the Essais by adding new material without deleting what he had already written.
- Complete the account of Montaigne’s method and its motto.
- Sort each feature of the Essais by whether it follows from Montaigne’s METHOD or describes his SUBJECT.
- Montaigne treats his own life not as exemplary biography, but as an assay of human nature. Why does he place…
- In which year did Montaigne first publish the Essais?
- How does Montaigne’s "add, never delete" method change the book a reader finally holds? Select every effect…
- How many essays does the collection contain across its three books?