Page 46 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

Researching an answer 45
hand, you do design a pattern of secondary sources as an
illuminating context in which to appreciate the primary text,
your choice and presentation of supporting material will
obviously reveal your principles. So do use some of your
reading time for essays in literary theory. Curiosity about
what you are trying to achieve in writing criticism must
increase your chances of success. Moreover, even those
students who feel intimidated by the prospect of studying
literary theory usually find in practice that discovering a
wider range of approaches can be fun.

Literary history and biography

A firm line is often drawn between scholarship as facts and
criticism as opinions. The information offered by a competent
literary historian or biographer is supposedly true even if of
debatable relevance. By contrast, criticism, the argument runs,
admits to making only partial and partisan contributions to a
continuing debate; so you should read it critically, feeling
sceptical and even downright suspicious about what it wishes
you to believe.
Yet even a textual editor, whom you at first take to be
fastidiously neutral and motivated solely by a wish to give you
the exact words of the text as its author intended, has to make
choices. The most elaborate variorum edition may still demote
some versions to a lowly and ghostly existence at the foot of the
page while privileging others above in a larger print as if these
form the only true text. Certainly some commentators would
now argue that literary history, like all history, is inevitably
partisan. Its author may never explicitly define—let alone
rationally defend—any theoretical premises. Yet limited space
will force selectivity. Many authors and texts will not be openly
attacked but just silently condemned as not even deserving to be
mentioned. The few that are judged admissible will be related
to each other in a patterned sequence: some systems of
connection and distinction will be given priority; others will be
quietly rejected. An implicit hierarchy of values will also emerge
in the varying amounts of space awarded to different texts.
More specifically, what aspects of any one text are
foregrounded and which ways of reading it are recommended