Critical Essay

The process of researching, planning and writing a critical essay can, and should, be enjoyable. If, at present, the prospect of such an exercise seems either dismal or daunting, that is almost certainly because you have not yet thought hard enough about your own aims in writing criticism. So this writing guide will pose some of the questions which you need to ponder if you are ever to discover what is, for you, the purpose and pleasure in composing critical essays.

Such questions inevitably depend on larger ones about the value of literature itself. These in turn raise even trickier issues about language, the human mind and the social structures within which we live and think. Some sections of this guide outline some of the theoretical questions that you need to consider. In such limited space, we have been able to give only the briefest account of each, even of those questions to which entire books have been devoted. You may therefore find certain passages frustratingly simplistic or irritatingly partisan. Provided that you are then provoked into thinking out your own more subtle or balanced formulation, you will still benefit.

But if many of the ideas here are wholly new to you, you may find the brevity merely baffling. Persevere for a while. Many university teachers, , find some of these issues uncomfortably challenging and you should feel no shame in having to progress carefully on such difficult terrain. Nevertheless, if you repeatedly get lost in one of the more theoretical sections, give it up for the time being and go on to read the rest of the book. You will find that even in sections discussing the most practical aspects of the essay-writing process, issues of broad principle are often raised, if only implicitly.

Whenever a critical technique - even one which, to the hasty glance of common sense, seems merely functional - is being deployed or recommended, major assumptions about the nature of literature and the purpose of criticism are being made. Any critical practice implies a principle. Since the most practical sections are designed to be clear and concise, teachers sometimes have to give advice about methodology without spelling out the ways in which a particular method will make your essay tacitly support one set of assumptions rather than another. At many points, however, it has proved possible to indicate briefly some of the alternative theories which underpin different essay writing styles. You may find that these passages, grounded as they are in specific examples of choices that the essay-writer must make, clarify those issues which had seemed to you elusively abstract when you first met them in one of the more theoretical passages. If so, you should eventually be able to return to such a passage and make more sense of it.

However diligently you read, or even reread, any writing guide, it cannot provide you with a guaranteed recipe for the good essay. Anyone who tells you that religious observance of a few simple rules will ensure success is either a fool or is patronizingly treating you as one. Of course, there are many recommendations in the following pages which seem to me almost indisputably right and likely to have the support of nearly all literature teachers. Nevertheless, at many other points where, to save space and time, one must sound just as baldly prescriptive, your own or your teacher's preferences may differ from mine. Thoughtful critics have always disagreed about what criticism should seek to achieve and which methods it should employ. But the variety of approaches now being offered by scholars, critics and theorists, and the vigour with which their debate is being conducted, are quite unprecedented.

Your confidence about that, like your skill in deploying your own choice of the various techniques discussed, is bound to be limited at first. It will grow only with practice. You will learn much from the advice of your teachers, the example (good or bad) of published criticism, discussion with your fellow students and, of course, your steadily deepening experience of an ever wider range of literary texts. Yet it will be the actual experience of writing essays which will teach you most about both the possibilities and the pitfalls of composing critical prose.