Page 25 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

24 How to write critical essays
Titles may imply premises which you should question

Think before you accept any assumptions which a title
implicitly makes. It is your job to weigh their soundness before
deciding whether an answer can be safely based upon them.
Here is an easy example: ‘“Richard II, being such an intimately
personal tragedy, is poignantly moving; yet it has moments
which do succeed in being genuinely funny.” Discuss.’ You must
ask yourself whether the text succeeds in being poignant, and
you must also answer the question of whether it is funny.
‘Personal’, too, should ring loud alarm bells. Is this really a
potentially sentimental story about one idiosyncratic person or
is it a latently polemical tale about an entire society?
Presumably political events can be tragic in their effect on
groups as well as on individuals.
The less obviously contentious word here is ‘tragedy’. Yet
many readers of Richard II have thought ‘history play’ an apter
description of it. When writing on this subject, you would have
to decide which category you think the play belongs to. Indeed
you might have to explore many of the issues raised by another
examination question on the play: ‘In what precise sense could
the term “tragedy” be applied to Richard II and how far is it an
adequate description?’
‘Tragedy’ is sometimes used neutrally to identify a genre
(though even then definitions vary enormously) but it is
sometimes offered evaluatively to imply a relative superiority.
You might be asked to discuss the idea that ‘Marlowe’s
Tamburlaine is an adventure story rather than a tragedy’. This
may strike you as merely descriptive unless you are too snooty
to admire the literature of action and suspense. When, however,
you are told that ‘Macbeth is not so much a tragedy as a gory
melodrama’, you may suspect that the title is condemning
artistic failure rather than identifying the class of literature to
which the play belongs. Perhaps you should rescue even
‘melodrama’ and ‘melodramatic’ from their derogatory
connotations. To assume that whole genres of literature are by
definition more or less significant is dangerous. It may make
you accept too uncritically the importance of some texts and
dismiss others too quickly as trivial.
The premises of the literary establishment tend to suggest,
for instance, that ‘epic’ is always to be applauded: essay titles