Page 39 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

38 How to write critical essays
so strongly that they quite often set about slaughtering each
other. The modern reader cannot feel exactly like one of the
passionately committed participants in such a dispute and at the
same time maintain a balanced understanding of the factors
that led both sides to see an issue so differently.
We learn about the past largely through reading texts written
in our own time. These constructions of the past, composed by
modern historians, cannot of course have influenced the
seventeenth-century readers whose experience you may seek to
recapture. Yet you cannot forget such constructions nor all the
other more recent texts, whether literary or not, which have
significantly shaped your own beliefs and feelings.
Moreover, partly under the influence of these texts, many of
the verbal styles that seemed natural to at least some
seventeenth-century readers have now come to sound quaintly
old-fashioned. They have been replaced by new discourses
reflecting the ideology of modern society. So the idioms in
which we speak to each other or write literary criticism may
force us to decode past verbalizations in a new way. However
diligently you consult a glossary, old words will still sound old.
However often you quote from an early text, your surrounding
prose will still pose it in a context which would sound distinctly
odd to its original readers.
Imagine that a group of suddenly resurrected Elizabethans
appear round your desk while you are composing your next
critical essay. As they begin to read over your shoulder, how
much guidance would they need before they could begin to
make sense of what you are doing? Remember that they come
from a time when the vast majority of their fellow citizens had
not been taught how to read anything at all, and that, for the
educated few who could read and write, the texts which were
thought most worth studying were in Latin or Ancient Greek.
Your baffled visitors lived three centuries before some
universities accepted the idea that texts written in one’s own
language could deserve serious study as literature. F.R.Leavis
was among the first students on the Cambridge English Tripos,
which, after a fairly ferocious controversy, was finally allowed
to start in 1917. At about the same surprisingly late date,
Cambridge at last decided that some women might be
sufficiently intelligent to be allowed a chance at a university
degree.