Page 77 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

76 How to write critical essays
You need to reveal the text and to offer sufficient contradictory
examples from it. Suppressing all evidence which embarrasses
your present contention could blind you to the more fertile
complexities and ambiguities which the texts contain. It may
thus deprive your reader of what might have been your most
interesting observations.
Excessive diffidence can be just as damaging. The neutral
balancing act in which you sustain patterns of opposed but
equally convincing evidence may seem graceful to you but could
strike your reader as frustrating cowardice.
It may anyway be not just undesirable but simply impossible
to disguise all your own beliefs about the deeper issues and
murkier problems. Limits of space obviously prevent your
reproducing every relevant text in its entirety. Yet such
transcription would be the only strategy which could achieve
strict accuracy. The episodes which your chosen allusions recall
and the localized effects which your selected quotations
emphasize will inevitably reveal some of your own priorities. Be
conscious of this as you wonder what evidence to include. You
can thus identify in time the sillier prejudices which must not be
allowed, even through such discreet implication, to infiltrate
your essay. Discriminate these from the more thoughtful
principles which can be defended and which your essay should
more frankly and systematically support.

Quotations

FREQUENCY

Literature tutors, when asked how often a student essay should
quote, are likely to wriggle. They may retreat behind some
version of that maddening, if honest, non-answer of ‘It all
depends’.
Some topics can hardly be treated at all without constant use
of verbatim extracts. You might be asked to tackle ‘How well
does Keats rhyme?’ Such an essay title amounts to a holdall
containing numerous specific queries each of which can only be
posed and resolved by quotation. For instance, stanza 7 of
Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ meets the final tricky demand of