Critical Essay
If you just glance at a set question and then immediately start to wonder how you will answer it, you are unlikely to produce an interesting essay, let alone a strictly relevant one. To write interesting criticism you need to read well. That means, among many other things, noticing words, exploring their precise implications, and weighing their usefulness in a particular context. You may as well get in some early practice by analyzing your title. There are anyway crushingly self-evident advantages in being sure that you do understand a demand before you put effort into trying to fulfill it.
Faced by any question of substantial length, you should make the first entry in your notes a restatement, in your own words, of what your essay is required to do. To this you should constantly refer throughout the process of assembling material, planning your answer's structure, and writing the essay. Since the sole aim of this reformulation is to assist your own understanding and memory, you can adopt whatever method seems to you most clarifying.
When your essay title uses one of the above imperatives, you must not assume that the demands represented by the others can be ignored. Many students are, for instance, misled by titles which tell them merely to describe some feature of a text. They think this sounds a less intellectually strenuous assignment than one which requires them to discuss or debate. They may offer a mere recital of facts rather than an argument about their significance. But the text which you are to describe will often be one which your reader already knows intimately. How you approach and assess even its most obvious features may be of interest to your tutor. The mere fact that these features exist will not. Description in a critical essay must initiate and contribute to debate.
Conversely, your being told merely to interpret a play or a novel would still require you to analyze the episodes into which it structures its story, the patterns by which it groups its personages, the distinct idioms through which it identifies their speech patterns and the recurring terms and images which compel all the characters to share its recognizably unified discourse. Interpretation must, of course, expose the ethical, religious or political value systems which a text implicitly reinforces or subverts. Yet these exist only in the architecture of its form and in the building materials of its language. What Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, for instance, is encouraging us to believe cannot be shown by a superficial summary of its plot. Such a summary might be almost identical with that of the original prose version of the story which Shakespeare found in North's translation of Plutarch.
Where Shakespeare's Julius Caesar does subtly deviate from its source, it suppresses some of the basic narrative's latent implications and foregrounds others. So interpretation of just how a particular work seeks to manipulate our definitions of what is true or desirable may also require you to make comparisons. You can hardly have sufficient sense of direction to know where one text is pushing you if your map of literature has no landmarks, and includes no texts which outline some alternative path. Thus, even where an essay title does not explicitly require you to approach one set text by reference to another, you are almost certain to find comparisons useful.
Nevertheless, you must wonder what the relatively few works which are regarded as literature do have in common. Your essay is bound to imply some theory as to why these should be studied and what distinguishes them from the vast majority of printed texts.
Student essays sometimes suggest that literature is composed of fictional and imaginative texts, and excludes those which aim to be directly factual or polemical. An English Literature syllabus, however, may include Shakespeare's plays about political history and Donne's sermons while excluding those often highly imaginative works which most of your fellow citizens prefer to read: science fiction, for instance, or pornography or historical romances or spy stories.
Alternatively, the focus of your critical essay may imply that the works which can be discussed profitably in critical prose share an alertness to language; that we can recognize a literary work because it appears at least as interested in the style through which it speaks as in the meaning which it conveys. Yet many of the texts which criticism scornfully ignores the lyrics of popular songs, advertising slogans, journalistic essays often play games with words and draw as much attention to signifier as to signified. There is now vigorous controversy as to which of the many available rationales if any does stand up to rational examination. Recognize the view which each critical method implicitly supports, and choose accordingly.
