Page 69 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

68 How to write critical essays
order of composition. More ideas might be conveyed by
arranging the paragraphs into discussions of distinct topics like
diction or metre or imagery.
You could then devote the second part of your essay to
exploring ‘dramatic’. You might seek to prove that
Shakespeare’s later plays define the possibilities and limitations
of their theatrical medium quite differently from his earlier
ones.
The danger of ordering your material around the order of
composition is that it is so soothingly easy. It may distract you
from the effort of deciding your own priorities. It may sap
curiosity as to what is the most convincing sequence in which to
explain your ideas. Where the question explicitly demands an
interest in such chronology you must, of course, ensure that
your essay constantly examines the relevance of that factor. Its
significance, however, can seldom be lucidly debated in an essay
whose own structure slavishly follows the order reported by
literary historians. Their facts must be used to stimulate and
support your own ideas.

THE TEXT’S OWN ORDER
A chronological structure, treating the parts of a long work in
the same sequence that the reader meets them, has one obvious
advantage. Loyalty to the text’s own strategy may conveniently
reveal what it actually feels like to be its reader. A text is itself
an essentially chronological phenomenon. In its earlier passages
it raises expectations in the reader’s mind which may
subsequently be fulfilled or frustrated. Later passages are
decoded by the memory’s recovery of previously planted signs.
Where essay titles focus on a work’s structure or story-line,
your answer is likely at some stage to progress by following the
text’s own route.
But relying on that sequence for the ordering of an entire essay
is rash. It risks paraphrase. An account of a narrative text may
dwindle into mere plot-summary. The skeletal reconstruction of
a polemical work may strip away the subtleties of its suasive
rhetoric and the palpabilities of the factual evidence or emotive
exemplars that it chooses to deploy. Commentary on a meditative
poem may translate the flavour of its individual tone into the
blandness of your own impersonal prose.