Page 26 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

Facing the question 25
inviting you to decide whether a work is an epic may imply
that the issue is almost synonymous with whether it is great:
‘“Far from fulfilling its pretensions to epic, Hardy’s The
Dynasts is clumsily constructed and colourlessly executed.”
Discuss.’ Here you should, of course, discuss the implicit
claim that there cannot be an incompetent epic, whereas a
sonnet, for example, however atrociously written, remains a
sonnet.
Journalism, on the other hand, tends to have a bad press in
essay titles (with a few perhaps arbitrary exceptions for
writers such as Samuel Johnson or Walter Pater). Consider the
evaluative premises lurking here: ‘“Defoe does not deserve to
be called the first English novelist. His fictions are thinly-
veiled essays in social analysis by an author who was little
more than an investigative reporter.” Do you agree?’ You must
not only decide how far you accept that Defoe’s major works
belong in one genre rather than another. You also need to
work out whether the texts prove that journalistic analysis of
society is innately more trivial than novel-writing. You might
even wish to define the genre of the novel as narrative fiction
which is indeed centred on ‘social analysis’ and not on
‘personal relationships’ or whatever you suspect the title of
suggesting.
So you may find it useful in reformulating titles to put a
capital ‘T’ for tendentious above any term which seems to you
to be more manipulative than it might at first appear. You can
also place a capital ‘P’ above any word or phrase which you
think discreetly infiltrates a premise which your essay must
question.

Short titles may require long and complex answers

Systematic discrimination between a title’s crucial terms and its
irrelevantly decorative verbiage should allow you to spot the
lengthy questions which are merely long-winded and the
succinct ones which actually make as great, or greater,
demands. Consider, for example, ‘Was Pope a true wit or
merely an imitator of others?’ ‘Wit’ is a notoriously unstable
term, shifting its emphases throughout the history of the
language. In the past the concept had far more to do with