In his essay, ‘What I found in My Pocket’, G.K. Chesterton states that he denies ‘most energetically that anything is, or can be, uninteresting’. The essay, in the literal sense, is about what he has kept in his pocket, and has decided to take out, and examine during a train ride. However, on closer evaluation, the real eccentricity and interestingness depicted within this essay is simply concealed within the mundane. Similarly, the same covert eccentricity...
In his essay, ‘What I found in My Pocket’, G.K. Chesterton states that he denies ‘most energetically that anything is, or can be, uninteresting’. The essay, in the literal sense, is about what he has kept in his pocket, and has decided to take out, and examine during a train ride. However, on closer evaluation, the real eccentricity and interestingness depicted within this essay is simply concealed within the mundane. Similarly, the same covert eccentricity is depicted within Virginia Woolf’s essay, ‘How Should One Read a Book?’. For that reason, Chesterton and Woolf argue when we consider material possession or the way in which we read, we are actually evaluating what it means to be interesting. Thus, both essayists conclude that what an individual applies to a seemingly common item or experience, is essential to its interestingness. Furthermore, recently, within her article ‘Merely Interesting’ Sianne Ngai argues that there’s no singular element that would constitute something to be interesting. Within this essay, I will argue that although the proposed argument advocated by both Chesterton and Woolf may be overly simple, both were nevertheless instrumental in constructing our modern understanding, that has been supplemented by contemporary essayists such as Ngai.
