Page 42 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

Researching an answer 41
personalities. Their subject-matter and stance have been
presented as favouring individual experience and the intimacies
of personal relationships. Their readers have been encouraged
to see themselves as relatively private beings, each responding
alone, as sensitively as possible, to meanings that supposedly
exist on the page and not in some larger world where the
influential context of the language itself is constantly
developing, where opinions are changed, societies alter, and the
relative power of different groups shifts.
That larger, more communal, world, some critics would still
argue, is not properly the business of the literary critic. The
student of linguistics, or of the history of ideas, or of
philosophy, may properly concentrate on the ways in which
language alters, or is altered by, our intellectual assumptions.
The political theorist, sociologist or professional historian may
legitimately focus on the way such assumptions create, or are
created by, the texts of a particular social group. The literary
critic, a traditionalist might insist, has a prior duty to the texts
themselves, to their intrinsic meanings and innate worth. What
light they may be able to throw on problems in other disciplines
must be of secondary importance. Indeed, there may be a
positive danger in the critic’s discussing such problems even
peripherally. Might it not lead to the imposition upon a text of
some politically partisan meaning, and is not the critic bound to
attempt impartiality, to discover respectfully what the text itself
is really saying?
The problem here may be that no wholly innocent reading of
a text is possible. To write your essay on the assumption that it
is could blind you to numerous factors which may compel you
actively to produce the meanings that you seem to be just
passively discovering.
A text’s import and worth may be subject to constant
redefinition as the conditions in which it is read alter. To take a
fairly obvious example, Shakespeare’s history plays were
reinterpreted at the time of the Second World War when
national survival seemed to depend on acceptance of strong
central government, and on a conspiracy to ignore, if only
temporarily, those conflicts of interest which had been making
domestic politics so vigorous. E.M.W.Tillyard’s book on the
plays (Shakespeare’s History Plays, London, 1944) and
Olivier’s rousingly patriotic film interpretation of Henry V were