Page 50 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

Researching an answer 49
reading published criticism is bound to improve your essays.
But so many students seem to have difficulty in nerving
themselves to criticize the critics that it seems worth risking a
few simple rules.
Get into the habit of reading reviews of new books of literary
criticism in The Times Literary Supplement and similar
journals. Here you will sometimes find critics being accused by
each other, not just of being mistaken, but of having produced
uselessly irrelevant or dangerously misleading books. Observing
how often those in the trade fear that the customer is being
conned should prevent your approaching the library shelves
with undue reverence.
Do ask your teachers—and your fellow students—about
published essays they have found useful. Encourage them to
remember which specific aspects of a text or topic seemed to be
illuminated by a given book or article.
Always read more than one critic’s account of any primary
text that you are investigating. Notice where the critics
disagree: not just in their more explicit conclusions but in less
obvious ways too. Notice, for instance, the different parts of the
text that each selects as worth any consideration at all. Try to
spot any premises about literature or life which one seems to
assume with more confidence than the other. Noticing where
they differ from each other should help you to define where
your views disagree with theirs.
Notice also what critics have in common. Do take an interest
in when a piece of criticism was first published. Try to observe
how fashions for certain kinds of approach have occurred at
certain stages.
There is, of course, no guarantee that criticism in any
ultimate sense makes progress. So beware of patronizing
works that you discover were written long ago. On the other
hand, do always try to find some articles which have been
written recently and which your hard-pressed tutor may not
find too familiar. The Modern Language Association
publishes annual bibliographies of literary criticism. If you
have access to a major library that stocks these and most of
the journals where listed articles appeared, do use it. Even if
your facilities are more limited, try to find some essays
published in the last ten or perhaps fifteen years. It is
obviously absurd, now that we are coming so close to the