Page 28 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

Facing the question 27
innately less worthy as topics for great drama than personal
relationships? Then there are those Christian critics who have
protested at the difficulty of staging Gloucester’s blinding.
Could this be because they fear that the impact of eyeballs
being torn out might make an audience reject the belief that
physical suffering can do good so long as it leads to spiritual
regeneration? But you may believe that a text contains for all
time some unaltering value or meaning. Then you are bound to
see the ideological pressures on criticism as hardly worth
discussion. You will assume that the best critics are motivated
only by a desire to see what has always been actually present in
the text itself; the worst may be trying to press it into serving
some non-literary cause, but they presumably do not deserve
consideration.
If, by contrast, you believe that the qualities and import of
a text are constantly being redefined and that all criticism is
bound to be creative production, then you will feel that to
‘account for’ those views of a text which have been ‘frequently
expressed’ during some period of a text’s history is often
crucial. You may even think that a major justification of
literary study is that the history of critical interpretations can
reveal how those with cultural influence have dominated in
the past, and so alert you to some of the contemporary
pressures under which you do the thinking and writing which
are supposedly your own. Whether you think that your essay
should discuss such topics must partly depend, of course, on
how you interpret the terms of the set question since relevance
to its demands is a major priority. But it is not the only one.
Here, as so often, your decision as to whether certain issues
should be tackled will also depend on your own theories about
literature and criticism.

Titles may tell you how much you need to read

‘Write an essay on King Lear’ clearly means that your priority is
to answer the question: how attentively have you read King
Lear? Yet it may also pose the following questions about your
reading: have you found any other works illuminating in
assessing that play? did any other plays by Shakespeare or his
contemporaries prove helpful as comparisons? did any literary