Page 29 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

28 How to write critical essays
work of some other period or genre seem relevant? what critical
books or essays stimulated your own thoughts?
Another example of a title which seems to choose your
reading for you might be: ‘Evaluate Leavis’s criticism of
Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind”.’ Obviously you must study
that poem and the passage in chapter six of F.R.Leavis’s
Revaluations (London, 1936) which attacks it. But your tutor
may also be asking: what other critical responses to the Ode
have you read? which of these seemed to you more or less
persuasive than Leavis’s and why? which other essays by Leavis
himself have you read, and did they help you to identify any
recurrent premises or prejudices which can be seen at work in
his rejection of Shelley? which other poems of Shelley have you
read and did they suggest to you that Leavis’s chosen example
was fair or misleadingly untypical?
Your tutor may give you a range of essay titles from which to
choose. Then you must calculate how much preparatory
reading each would require before you make your selection.
If, for instance, you have previously read only one of
Dickens’s novels and have limited time, it is obvious which of
the following questions you should attempt:

(a) Write a detailed analysis of one chapter from any of
Dickens’s novels and show how far its subject-matter
and style typify the rest of the book.
(b) ‘Dickens’s earlier works are competent but lack
originality. It is only in the later novels that we can hear
that distinctively subtle voice which makes most other
Victorian novelists sound ponderous.’ Discuss.
Adequate reading for (b) would include at least two ‘earlier
works’ and at least two ‘later novels’ since the plural is used in
both phrases. Yet it is the demand for knowledge of a majority
of other Victorian novelists which would defeat most students.
You would need to have read at least one novel by nearly every
major novelist of the period before you could form a judgement
on whether their works sound relatively ponderous.
So too an essay on ‘Tennyson’s originality’ should only be
attempted by someone who knows—or has time to get to
know—the Romantic verse which had been published in the
decades before Tennyson’s first volume, Poems by Two
Brothers (1830).