Page 20 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

Facing the question 19
often be one which your reader already knows intimately. How
you approach and assess even its most obvious features may be
of interest to your tutor. The mere fact that these features exist
will not. Description in a critical essay must initiate and
contribute to debate. To ‘Describe’ is in fact to ‘Discuss’. To
discuss intelligently is to be specific, to observe details, to
identify the various parts which together determine a work’s
overall impact. So you must ‘Analyse’ even where the title’s
imperatives do not explicitly include that demand.
Conversely, your being told merely to ‘Interpret’ a play or a
novel would still require you to analyse the episodes into which
it structures its story, the patterns by which it groups its
personages, the distinct idioms through which it identifies their
speech patterns and the recurring terms and images which
compel all the characters to share its recognizably unified
discourse. Interpretation must, of course, expose the ethical,
religious or political value systems which a text implicitly
reinforces or subverts. Yet these exist only in the architecture of
its form and in the building materials of its language. What
Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, for instance, is encouraging us to
believe cannot be shown by a superficial summary of its plot.
Such a summary might be almost identical with that of the
original prose version of the story which Shakespeare found in
North’s translation of Plutarch.
Where Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar does subtly deviate from
its source, it suppresses some of the basic narrative’s latent
implications and foregrounds others. So interpretation of just
how a particular work seeks to manipulate our definitions of
what is true or desirable may also require you to make
comparisons. You can hardly have sufficient sense of direction
to know where one text is pushing you if your map of
literature has no landmarks, and includes no texts which
outline some alternative path. Thus, even where an essay title
does not explicitly require you to approach one set text by
reference to another, you are almost certain to find
comparisons useful.
‘Compare’—even where it is not immediately followed by
‘and contrast’—does not mean that you should simply find the
common ground between two texts. You must look for
dissimilarities as well as similarities. The more shrewdly
discriminating your reading of both texts has been, the more