Page 40 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

Researching an answer 39
The fact that you are capable of writing some sort of critical
essay and probably not capable of writing competent poetry in
Latin, Ancient Greek and Italian (as Milton did) may have
something to do with your own individual talents as an author.
It most certainly has a lot to do with your education.
Moreover, your definitions of what kinds of knowledge or
skill are worth acquiring do not derive only from your official
teachers. You might try to list for yourself some of the
innumerable other sources of influence which have determined
what kind of statements seem to you worth making and what
kind seem to you boring or meaningless.
Family and friends, books and magazines, films and
television programmes, popular songs and advertisements are
obvious influences; but think too of the structures within
which you have met or made the various statements that you
can understand and imitate. Would someone from the
seventeenth century be able to grasp all those forces that
determine the motivation and methodology which you will
bring to writing your next critical essay? You would have to
explain the modern system of further education and the
demands it places upon the group of students to which you
belong; the criteria for admission to particular institutions; the
examination system; the rewards of academic success in terms
of jobs, status and social mobility. Some of these issues might
require you to sketch the overall political, economic and social
system of the country.
You would have to explain that ‘literature’ no longer means
(as it still did in the seventeenth century) the entire body of
available books and other writings; that a tiny minority of texts
are currently given an especially privileged status as literature;
that this literature is divided on national lines; and that
authorship, even in the case of theatre scripts, is now regarded
as a crucial factor in the evaluation of literary works. Your
visitors would need to be told that this process of evaluation
has been a major growth area for over half a century and now
provides full-time employment for some of the most
sophisticated people in our society.
Think, too, of all the more specific advice that you would
need to offer about the genre of a student essay in criticism
before your time-travellers could begin to interpret your essay’s
content, let alone judge the quality of its style and structure. It