Page 21 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

20 How to write critical essays
your comparison will reveal points at which there is a difference
of degree, if not of kind.
Nevertheless, you must wonder what the relatively few
works which are regarded as literature do have in common.
Your essay is bound to imply some theory as to why these
should be studied and what distinguishes them from the vast
majority of printed texts.
Student essays sometimes suggest that literature is composed
of fictional and imaginative texts, and excludes those which aim
to be directly factual or polemical. An English Literature
syllabus, however, may include Shakespeare’s plays about
political history and Donne’s sermons while excluding those
often highly imaginative works which most of your fellow
citizens prefer to read: science fiction, for instance, or
pornography or historical romances or spy stories.
Alternatively, the focus of your essay may imply that the
works which can be discussed profitably in critical prose share
an alertness to language; that we can recognize a literary work
because it appears at least as interested in the style through
which it speaks as in the meaning which it conveys. Yet many of
the texts which criticism scornfully ignores—the lyrics of
popular songs, advertising slogans, journalistic essays—often
play games with words and draw as much attention to signifier
as to signified. There is now vigorous controversy as to which
of the many available rationales—if any—does stand up to
rational examination. Recognize the view which each critical
method implicitly supports, and choose accordingly.
‘Evaluate’ may also be already implicit in each of the other
imperatives which tend to recur in essay titles. Description
without any sense of priorities would be shapeless and never-
ending. Discussion must be based on some sense of what
matters. Analysis may involve a search for the significant
among the relatively trivial. Interpretation of a text, and even
more obviously comparison of it with another, tends to work—
however tentatively—towards some judgement as to the relative
importance of what it has to say and the degree of skill with
which it says it.
Conversely, evaluative judgements only become criticism
when they are grounded upon accurate description of the
work which is being praised or condemned. If such
judgements are to be sufficiently precise to be clear and