Page 41 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

40 How to write critical essays
may be that you, in spite of being its author, could not afford
the time to explain much about your own feelings or your
personal morality. There would be so many more obviously
necessary explanations about the demands in which your essay
originates.
Of course, there are important senses in which your essay
should, and can, reflect your own opinions and responses,
and other portions of this book are largely devoted to
helping you to do just that. Nevertheless, you can use your
own experience as a writer to see that even the most honest
attempts at self-expression are shaped not only by the author
but by the readers he or she anticipates. Think of the
strikingly distinct prose-styles that you use in writing letters.
The joky one to an old schoolfriend, where your syntax and
vocabulary are designed to show that you still speak the
same language, will obviously be quite different from the
style in which you try to persuade either a stranger that you
deserve a job, or a distant relative that you are grateful for a
present. These are not differences of truth and falsehood. In
all three cases you may feel that you can sincerely claim to
have values in common with your correspondent. But to
make that claim acceptable in each case demands a different
authorial voice. Now consider the essay through which you
prove that you do belong in the academic community by
showing your familiarity with yet another set of linguistic
and social conventions. This text will resemble in many ways
those essays which other students on the same course are
submitting. It may sound unrecognizably different from any
of the letters which you, as a supposedly original author,
have composed at much the same time.
Yet, if you are not thinking hard enough, you may imply, in
this very essay, that texts always portray their authors’
personalities rather than their anticipated readers’ demands.
You may even find yourself evaluating some novel on the
premise that, if its characters are accurately drawn, their speech
and behaviour will reflect their own autonomous personalities
and not the rules of any social game which they are required to
play.
The concept of personality dominates much of the literary
criticism that you are likely to have so far read. Not only have
texts been seen as originating in, and reflecting, their authors’