Page 37 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

36 How to write critical essays
time and effort if you use sufficient cross-references from your
essay notes to fully written-out quotations and ideas in your
resource notes. Demarcation lines will often be hard to draw
but any conscious difficulty here can be useful in forcing you,
from the outset of your reading, to start thinking about what
your essay should include to be a sufficiently thoughtful and
detailed answer and what it may have to exclude if it is to
define a clear sense of priorities. If you do decide to make
separate essay notes, these must at first be highly provisional.
No decisions about what subjects deserve whole paragraphs or
how these should be ordered can be made until, at the very
least, you have finished reading all the relevant texts.

Secondary sources and some problems in literary theory
Works of literary theory, history, biography or criticism are
often called ‘secondary’ sources and distinguished from
‘primary’ ones which, for your purposes in writing an essay, are
those literary texts specified as your subject and any other
works of literature which seem to you essential comparisons.
The terminology implies a hierarchy which you should probably
accept since most teachers will insist that study of the primary
texts must be your priority.
Nevertheless, the distinction between primary texts—
supposedly original, autonomous works of art—and secondary
sources—arguably parasitical since they admit to being texts
about texts—can be misleading. A work which might
traditionally have been called ‘creative’ literature may itself be
highly derivative. It may critically reconstruct fragments from
already extant texts so that a well-read audience can interpret
this new arrangement in the light of earlier ones, and vice
versa.
Conversely, the methods by which a critic manipulates
language may be as creative in some senses as those deployed
by, for instance, a novelist. Both may construct themselves as
voices which the reader will trust to report accurately some
pre-existent truth. The work of Donne described by T.S.Eliot
in his essay on ‘The Metaphysical poets’ or the Dorset
landscape described by Hardy in one of his novels are both
perhaps newly created phenomena. Neither may have ever