Page 117 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

116 How to write critical essays
kind of wild energy, an almost obsessed type of joy and
excitement.’ The frustrated readers, of course, are left to find
their own answers to the essay-writer’s begged questions.
Which unmentioned specifics could have been added at the
point which the phrase ‘and so on’ leaves vague? What
particular ‘sort’ of comedy? Just how ‘many’ of the words have
what exact ‘kind of’ energy?
That evasive phrase ‘type of’ raises particular problems with
its confusing implication of the typical. Consider: ‘Marlowe’s
Faustus is a representative of a certain type of Renaissance
intellectual.’ This presumably is a long-winded attempt to call
Faustus ‘a typical Renaissance intellectual’ but to do so would
not, of course, be sufficient. Would you understand what was
meant if you were described as a ‘typical twentieth-century
intellectual’?
If the student had worked towards a sufficient knowledge of
Renaissance thought, the essay could have offered a more
helpfully precise version: ‘Marlowe’s Faustus typifies the
sceptical, almost cynical, energies of those Renaissance
intellectuals who were closer to Hobbes than Hooker.’ It may,
however, be safer to avoid mentioning ‘types’ at all since there
is the inherent risk of reductively stereotyped thinking in using
the term: too many texts and too many of their individual
components can lose their shape when critical prose squashes
them back into some larger, more amorphous mass—the
blancmange that supposedly typified ‘Augustan literary
convention’ or ‘Victorian uncertainties’ or ‘1930s Angst’.
Here is another example. It offers at least four overt
warnings that the writer is not choosing to be precise:

In As You Like It, Corin and Touchstone are somewhat akin
to the traditional double-act with a ‘straight’ man or what
you might call a fool. It is here that we are reminded that the
differentiation between ‘proper’ theatre and what we would
probably describe as Vaudeville or Music Hall did not exist
in Shakespeare’s time. Yet there is something of a failure in
the play’s ‘jokeyness’.
‘Somewhat akin’ does not tell us how close the writer judges the
comparison to be. The quotation marks round certain words
signal enough intelligence to suspect their appropriateness or
propriety but not sufficient industriousness to seek out more