View Single Post
  #4  
Old Friday, July 08, 2011
as clear as mud as clear as mud is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Jul 2006
Posts: 31
Thanks: 0
Thanked 2 Times in 2 Posts
as clear as mud is on a distinguished road
Default B-researching an answer

Before you begin to think about the overall shape of essay, you must gather information and ideas.
Read the whole of each set text
The absolute priority is to investigate any work while essay title specifies as your subject. You must read every possible detail of it. However long it is and however tedious some part may seem at first glance, there can be no skip-reading. If you feel that you have been day-dreaming for a few pages, or few lines, go back and read them properly.
On some rare and regrettable occasions, other commitments or sheer incompetence in organizing your time may interfere.
READ AGAIN
Whenever possible, read a work more than once. If your essay is to be devoted to a single topic, you must read it slowly and thoughtfully at least three times before you begin to plan an answer.
READING ALOUD
If you are reading verse, listen as well as look. Read aloud as much as you can. Alertness to specifics can be aroused by this method when you are studying many prose works too, and not just plays or novels that rely on dialogue.
When you are going to recite some passage out loud, think what pace or tone seems appropriate. Try to hear the voice prescribed by the printed page, to articulate its meaning and to do justice to its emotive potential. Observe how often a passage exploits sound effects. The more it does so, the more necessary it will be to read it aloud if you are to notice what you are reading.
READ WITH YOUR DICTIONARY AND THESAURUS READILY AT HAND
You must possess a dictionary as an essential tool of the trade. Do not try to skip any word which you do not fully understand. Pause to explore the context. If that does not decisively reveal what the word must mean, consult your dictionary. The dictionary you own will be relatively small. It has to be easy to handle.
Likewise, a thesaurus can be as helpful as an ordinary dictionary. For the words that occur consistently refer to your thesaurus and locate some high frequency words for them. Repetition of those words along with revision of their alternative would automatically improve your vocabulary.
LEAVE EACH BOUT OF READING MEMORIZING A SPECIFIC
If you pause at the end of one act of a play or a chapter of novel or one poem in a collection, do not close your mind as you close the book. While you are making a cup of coffee or putting on your coat to go out, recite to yourself a line or phrase from the text which you have just been reading. Each time, you should acquire some fragment of the text's own texture even if the extract is no more than three or four words long. What you have learnt by heart you can carry around in your head.
Pondering, even in the oddest places, such unofficial acorn can often nurture them into intellectual oaks of extraordinary strength and complexity.
Make notes
Do not just start turning the pages of a specified text, hoping that insight will seep up through your fingertips. Read with pen in hand and a determination to make frequent notes, unless you are constantly looking for points worth recording you will discover few and remember less.
Some of your notes should be exposing such localize details that you may want to add or underline the relevant page of the printed text. Such annotations are unlikely to muffle the text's own chosen chronology since that remains visibly present among your own comments. When later you consult your running commentary you still have the appropriate passage of the text before you and can discover more than you had first registered: You may find it helpful to aim to compose your own index inside the back cover of a book, assembling references to all the contexts in which a particular character appears or some recurrent theme is explored or some crucial word is deployed. Of course, you may be among those who regard the marking of books as sacrilegious. Even if you are not, the copy that you are reading may not be your own but the library's or a friend's, and then there can be no question of adding even the most lightly penciled comment.
Obviously you will anyway need to make fuller notes else where. Design a system for these that concentrate your particular kind of mind and bully yourself into using it. Do check, as your notes grow, that you are not just producing a paraphrase. The risk of this is greatest when you are handling a long work. You may be tempted, after reading another chapter of a novel and jotting down a summary of the main plot events that it contains, to stop writing and proceed immediately to read the next chapter. Such notes will prove almost useless when you come to write your essay. Of course, in some contexts, narrative structure can be a relevant, and indeed, fascinating issue; but to discuss it sensibly you will need to have noticed and remembered far more than simply the number of a chapter in which some incident occurs.
The most helpful entries in your notes will be those that record your own thoughts about the significance of the passage that your reading has then reached. Many of these will define issues which you cannot hope to resolve until, at the very least, you have read the entire text. Meanwhile, to read alertly means to read questioningly. You should begin to be suspicious if, as your notes grow, they are not including many suggestions that end in question marks.
Another danger sign is a steady consistency in the length of notes that each chapter of a novel or each scene of a play has inspired. This will almost certainly mean that you are not thinking hard enough to make even provisional decisions as to which parts of the text matter more than others, and which issues are so unusually complex that you need to use more words if you are to remember what you thought.
Worry, too, if notes on later portions of a long work do not include references to earlier ones. You cannot be thinking about the impact of what you are reading if you do not notice some emerging patterns of anticipation and echo, or some potentially interesting points of comparison and contrast, which your essay can eventually investigate.
Finally, do check that you are including verbatim quotations, however brief some of these may be. If you are being sufficiently alert to the ways in which style determines substance, you will find yourself recording examples to remind yourself of exactly what you did notice about the text's own use of language. The actual process of copying out extracts may jog you into registering more about their phrasing or their precise implications. Do accompany each quotation by a reminder as to why it strikes you as significant. Even if the reason now seems to you self-evident, do trouble to spell it out for the sake of your future self.
When you are reading a text for the first time, you will have to settle initially for a simple, chronological arrangement of notes following the text's own sequence. In other cases you may choose to organize some, or even all, of your notes into separate sections on particular topics. If so, be sure that you do still notice the text's own choice of the order in which readers must meet its manipulative devices of language or its puzzles and revelations in thought and plot. Some of your headings could invite notes about, for instance, narrative structure. All of your entries should be accompanied by exact references. Fail to do this and you will not just underestimate the significance of the text's timing; you may also waste an infuriating amount of time later in finding some quotation whose accuracy you need to check.
Allow your growing experience of the text to correct or expand your sense of what the significant issues are. Expect to delete or rephrase some headings and to add many more. Even if you have not been asked simply to 'write an essay on' some named text but are faced by a far more specific question, do try to prevent its exerting an undue influence on what your notes discover in the text. Your fast guesses as to what will prove relevant are likely to be too narrow. You anyway want to gain much more from your reading than just one essay. How you define your loftier or more hedonistic purposes will depend on your own view of the uses of literature. However, you will want these notes to have value long after you have written your essay. Ensure that their range and depth will still be an adequate resource when quite different issues are raised by an examiner or by your own maturing curiosity.
You may think it worth while to accumulate, at the same time as your full notes on the text, a separate and far more selective series of jottings in response to the demands of a set question. The inevitable duplication need not cost too much time and effort if you use sufficient cross-references from your essay notes to fully written-out quotations and ideas in your resource notes. Demarcation lines will often be hard to draw but any conscious difficulty here can be useful in forcing you, from the outset of your reading, to start thinking about what your essay should include to be a sufficiently thoughtful and detailed answer and. what it may have to exclude if it is to define a clear sense of priorities. If you do decide to make separate essay notes, these must at first be highly provisional. No decisions about what subjects deserve whole paragraphs or how these should be ordered can be made until, at the very least, you have finished reading all the relevant texts.
Secondary sources and some problems in literary theory
We learn about the past largely through reading texts written in our own time. These constructions of the past, composed by modern historians, cannot of course have influenced the seventeenth-century readers whose experience you may seek to recapture. Yet you cannot forget such constructions or all the other more recent texts, whether literary or not, which have significantly shaped your own beliefs and feelings. Moreover, partly under the influence of these texts, many of the verbal styles that seemed natural to at least some seventeenth-century readers have now come to sound quaintly old-fashioned. They have been replaced by new discourses reflecting the ideology of modem society. So the idioms in which we speak to each other or write literary criticism may force us to decode past verbalizations in a new way. However diligently you consult a glossary, old words will still sound old. However often you quote from an early text, your surrounding prose will still pose it in a context which would sound distinctly odd to its original readers.
Imagine that a group of suddenly resurrected Elizabethans appear round your desk while you are composing your next critical essay. As they begin to read over your shoulder, how much guidance would they need before they could begin to make sense of what you are doing? Remember that they come from a time when the vast majority of their fellow citizens had not been taught how to read anything at all, and that, for the educated few who could read and write, the texts which were thought most worth studying were in Latin or Ancient Greek. Your baffled visitors lived three centuries before some universities accepted the idea that texts written in one's own language could deserve serious study as literature. F. R. Leavis was among the first students on the Cambridge English Tripos, which, after a fairly ferocious controversy, was finally allowed to start in 1917. At about the same surprisingly late date, Cambridge at last decided that some women might be sufficiently intelligent to be allowed a chance at a university degree.
A text's import and worth may be subject to constant redefinition as the conditions in which it is read. To take a fairly obvious example, Shakespeare's history plays were reinterpreted at the time of the Second World War when national survival seemed to depend on acceptance of strong central government, and on a conspiracy to ignore, if only temporarily, those conflicts of interest which had been making domestic politics so vigorous. E. M. W. Tillyard's book on the plays (Shakespeare's History Plays, London, 1944) and Olivier's rousingly patriotic film interpretation of Henry V were not seen as propaganda but merely as practical attempts to make interesting sense of old texts for a modem audience. It is extremely hard to recognize contemporary productions of literary texts as localized, temporary and manipulative adaptations. One of the advantages of studying the history of literary reputations and the critical rationales by which these have been promoted or challenged is that distance of time exposes the creativity which may be involved in all readings.
Many writers, of course, still work on the assumption that such problems are slight and should be overcome. The greatest texts supposedly encapsulate truths which are, and always will be, as relevant as when they were first defined. The finest authors are seen as having been transcendentally superior to the people among whom they lived. Largely unaffected by contemporary habits of thought and patterns of language, they discovered original meanings which they then crystallized into new verbalizations. Centuries later, unless we are too distracted by merely superficial aspects of modern life, we can still decode the author's intended message and see how it remains just as applicable today.
There is a paradox here. Is the text to be admired for its universality or its uniqueness? To the traditionalist critic, the author is essentially an individual, valued for rarity of vision and novelty of insight. Genius invents its own style, constructing a hitherto unavailable experience in a previously unknown pattern of signs. Yet, if the text is also to be valued for communicating recognizable truth, it may need to tell readers what they already know. Your essay may suggest that we can evaluate the accuracy of a landscape poet by remembering the literal appearances of the natural world itself; or that we can measure the subtlety of a novelist's characterization by comparing the fictional personages with our prior knowledge of how real people behave. The text's language has somehow to be the original creation of an extraordinary person and a precise echo of what many generations of ordinary readers have always believed.
The paradox may be explicable in terms of 'What oft was thought but never so well expressed'. The implicit premise here is that reality exists quite independently from the vocabulary in which we may sometimes choose to describe it. The mind can supposedly look at the world, or experience its own movements, without recourse to words. It mayor may not then decide to seek out verbal equivalents for what it has already understood.
Many modem critics now work on the contrary hypothesis. They suggest that it is language itself which allows us to form a view of human experience. We see things distinct from one another only because we have a vocabulary in which literally to tell them apart. In the beginning was not 'thought' but 'the word'. When a text proposes one construction of experience as peculiarly 'well expressed' we judge its claim by reference to other, equally verbal constructions through which we have hitherto shaped our thoughts.
What our language allows to sound sensible will seem true, and even our most private thoughts may derive - however unconsciously - from language. Perhaps we discover what sense we are making of things only by talking to ourselves and listening to the words in which we define our experience. If what our vocabulary cannot name remains literally unthinkable, language is the name of all the games which our minds can play.
Some modern theorists thus advance serious reasons for approaching literature playfully. A text should be prevented from persuading us that it can refer to some reality beyond language. When Burns assures us that his girl-friend is 'like a red, red rose. That's newly sprung in June', we should perhaps notice how often we have 'read' this way of talking about women in the highly sexist discourse of our love-poetry.
Most of the distinctions between men and women that we take for granted have been written in by our language. Where other languages draw different lines between the genders, love functions differently. For instance, in a society where physically demanding labor with crops and livestock is regarded as women's work, cultural tradition may more often have celebrated a beloved girl's body for its functional strength and less often for its decorative delicacy.
Male readers may feel moved here by a poignant suggestion that female beauty - which they seek to possess and retain - all too quickly disappears. A feminist reader, if she, too, takes 'My love' to mean the poet's girl-friend, is not likely to admire the text's implication that adolescent girls do briefly fascinate but all too soon mature into irrelevance. She may feel able to evaluate the poem more highly if she interprets 'My Love' as referring to the poet's own emotion: like all constructions of feeling - including all those ways in which women have been read - it will eventually be dismantled.
Some student essays - and not necessarily the worst - still concentrate exclusively on internal evidence from the primary text and resolutely ignore the existence of any secondary sources which may have determined its origins, its initial reception and its current reputation. In so doing, whether they recognize what they are up to or not, they imply their support for one theory of how literature should be read, and their rejection of many others. If, on the other hand, you do design a pattern of secondary sources as an illuminating context in which to appreciate the primary text, your choice and presentation of supporting material will obviously reveal your principles. So do use some of your reading time for essays in literary theory. Curiosity about what you are trying to achieve in writing criticism must increase your chances of success. Moreover, even those students who feel intimidated by the prospect of studying literary theory usually find in practice that discovering a wider range of approaches can be fun.
Literary history and biography
A firm line is often drawn between scholarship as facts and criticism as opinions. The information offered by a competent literary historian or biographer is supposedly true even if of debatable relevance. By contrast, criticism, the argument runs, admits to making only partial and partisan contributions to a continuing debate; so you should read it critically, feeling skeptical and even downright suspicious about what it wishes you to believe.
Yet even a textual editor, whom you at fast take to be fastidiously neutral and motivated solely by a wish to give you the exact words of the text as its author intended, has to make choices. The most elaborate variorum edition may still demote some versions to a lowly and ghostly existence at the foot of the page while privileging others above in a larger print as if these form the only true text. Certainly some commentators would now argue that literary history, like all history, is inevitably partisan. Its author may never explicitly define - let alone rationally defend - any theoretical premises. Yet limited space will force selectivity. Many authors and texts will not be openly attacked but just silently condemned as not even deserving to be mentioned. The few that are judged admissible will be related to each other in a patterned sequence: some systems of connection and distinction will be given priority; others will be quietly rejected. An implicit hierarchy of values will also emerge in the varying amounts of space awarded to different texts. More specifically, what aspects of anyone text are fore grounded and which ways of reading it are recommended will depend on the expert's own convictions as to what a culture should create or conserve.
The converse process by which certain emphases and interpretations are censored is potentially even more costly. Of course, a politically radical interpretation of Paradise Lost or The Prelude need not be explicitly forbidden as wickedly subversive. The scholar's approach can just bypass it as ignorantly tangential: a cul-de-sac fit only for the ill-informed or the simple-minded. The English Civil War may be briefly acknowledged as contemporary with Milton's epic. The French Revolution may be mentioned as close in time to Wordsworth's verse autobiography. Yet, in a guide to the origins of Paradise Lost, Virgil and Dante might still be given overwhelmingly more space than contemporary politics. An account of how The Prelude discovered its substance and style may devote far more pages to Wordsworth's study of earlier poets (particularly Milton himself, as it happens) than to his experience of revolution in Paris or his later fears that England itself might become unrecognizably democratic.
You may think that texts simply do not have that kind of power; you may think that they mirror, rather than create, the beliefs which determine behavior. Certainly, to seem comprehensible to their contemporary readers, texts do have to work within a given vocabulary. The parameters of that vocabulary do perhaps reflect the prevailing political climate. A text's language must acknowledge those distinctions between the meaningfully important and the meaninglessly trivial which are accepted by the dominant culture. Nevertheless, within these limits, an energetic work of literature may still make itself sufficient room for maneuver to redefine its readers' assumptions about what is conceivable or desirable. 'Poets', as Shelley argues in his preface to Prometheus Unbound, 'are in one sense the creations and in another the creators of their age'.
So, too, are scholars and critics. Their preferences among texts can be both cause and effect of what modern society values in its past history. Shelley himself, for instance, wrote a poem called 'England in 1819' about a major political event of that year. Unarmed and peaceful demonstrators in Manchester had been listening to speeches in favor of ordinary people being allowed the vote. Cavalry with drawn sabers were sent in to disperse them. Many men and women were injured. Some were killed. Shelley in that year wrote more than one poem which might have made the massacre an unforgettable martyrdom to be remembered by any reader who values freedom. The poems, like those whom they seek to commemorate, are in fact now largely forgotten. Yet as an attentive student of literary history, for the sake of comparison and contrast in an essay, you may still learn to remember 1819 as a crucial year because it was then that Keats wrote odes to a nightingale and to a piece of ancient Greek pottery.
Moreover, personalizing a text as the product of some interestingly individualistic intellect often leads to its content being structured around other supposed individuals. A novel’s characterization may be assumed to matter more than its support for, or challenge to, the values of a given society. If a playwright's own idiosyncrasies of behavior are emphasized, then the voices of the dramatic text are likely to be explored as interestingly deviant from, rather than typical of, a particular social group or economic class.
The alliance of literary historians and biographers can be exemplified by the reported superiority of Elizabethan to medieval drama. Dr Faustus is often described as an advance on Everyman less because it offers a subtler analysis of its society than because it explores the idiosyncratic thoughts and feelings of its individualistic characters.
Published criticism
Some students find that the wider their wanderings among the critics the more they can discover in the text itself. They return to the text alerted to the range of ways in which it can be enjoyed and curious about their own sense of priorities. It helps them in fact to read more thoughtfully and observantly.
Others find published criticism distracting or inhibiting. They tend to be overwhelmed by memories of someone else's emphases. They feel nervous about their own interest in issues which published critics have ignored. They may even find that they have simply spent so much time reading critical articles that they have too little left to gain a confident knowledge of the text itself.
Provided that you explore other people's opinions to stimulate yourself into discovering and defining your own, 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.
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 examiner may not find too familiar.
Try to approach a published essay of criticism not just as a set of opinions which could equally well be paraphrased, but as a carefully composed exercise in rhetoric. Observe how its prose-style claims a given personality for its author and constructs one for its reader. There are, for instance, critics who make assumptions about the social class and even the gender of the people who will read their essays. Notice the relative weighting of different stages of the argument and the sequence in which these have been arranged. Observing techniques of style and structure will save you from mistaking one person's effort for the word of God. It should also give you useful tips as to how you can make your own criticism more persuasive or amusing.
Sample only a few pages of a critical essay and then make a decision as to whether it will prove useful. In some cases, just a few paragraphs may convince you that the author's topic or approach is too remote from your own and that you must move on to try another essay if you are. to find enough genuinely thought-provoking material in the time available.
On those that do prove worth reading in full, you must make notes or you will soon forget what you have learnt. Do not just write down a paraphrase of or quotations from, the critic's views. Record as frequently as possible your own reactions. Reservations - including reference to any textual evidence that the critic seems to be forgetting or undervaluing may prove particularly useful. Record your observations not only of what is argued but also of how that argument is presented.
What you will value most highly afterwards is your record of your own new ideas which have just been stimulated by your reading. Make sure that you identify unmistakably the precise point at which your summary of the critic gives way to your own thoughts, and that at which your observations about the text cease and a summary of the critic's begins once more. Use a system of square brackets or separate columns or different colored inks: anything provided that it is absolutely clear. Your notes must remind you of what is, and is not, your own to avoid any risk of accidental plagiarism in your essay. There is anyway a more immediate gain: you can see by a glance at your notes whether the published essay is provoking you to many noteworthy thoughts of your own or is producing no more than an uninterrupted summary of its own propositions. If long uninterrupted, they are almost certainly being accepted unquestioningly. Wake up and start thinking. Alternatively, decide that this piece of criticism is not capable of interesting you into thinking for yourself and abandon it. Try another instead.
Discuss your essay subject with friends or relatives
Students too often work alone. Lonely minds get lazy, lose concentration and feel bored. So talk about the literary problems which you are tackling. Listen to other people's understanding of them. Discuss their proposed solutions. Informal teamwork can often make progress where the isolated intellect is stationary or fruitlessly circling.
If you explain to someone else what you think about a book, you will have a far clearer grasp of your own thoughts. If you listen to other people chatting about what they have noticed in a text or how they respond to some feature of it, you are almost bound to gain new ways of reading, thinking and eventually writing.
Of course, the person you like talking to most may know little or nothing about the relevant text. Yet discussion could still help you. Show someone a particular passage which fascinates or puzzles you. Even on the basis of only the haziest understanding of the overall context, he or she may notice specifics which you have missed, and may query premises which you have unconsciously taken for granted.
Where friends fail, and you are living with parents or spouse or reasonably mature siblings or offspring, try one of these. Some relative must like you enough to be interested in your interests. Explain where you need help in deciding what you think of a book or how best to design an answer to your essay's question. Spell out your feelings of pleasure or bafflement or anger at what a text seems to be doing and saying. Discover whether others understand your response, and do your best to understand theirs.
If at a late stage of preparing for a particular essay you still feel you have nothing to say which could interest a friend or relative, start worrying. Perhaps you have still not bullied yourself into finding sufficiently interesting ideas. Then you must be at risk of perpetrating the offence of producing an essay which merely states the drearily obvious. Perhaps, even though you are full of latently entertaining thoughts, you are still so vague about them that you cannot verbalize them adequately. If so, you are far from being ready to write your essay. What you cannot yet explain to someone who knows you well will make no sense to your tutor.
The grimmest explanation would be that you yourself are not sufficiently interested in how literature works to enjoy discussing it in your free time. In that case you should transfer to a different course. Find some subject about which you can care enough to think hard and do well.
If, on the other hand, literary texts are what you want to understand and yet you are still trying to make sense of them alone, you must be mismanaging your social life. Change it. Just possibly you should be trying to make new contacts but it is far more likely .that you merely need to nerve yourself to make better use of your present ones. Work out what fear is inhibiting you and overcome it. Remember that others too may be hiding their own fears of being thought foolish or ignorant or over-earnest or simply interfering. Help them to help you. You are unlikely to write well about literature unless you can hear how you and others talk about it
Reply With Quote