Writing about Literature
Introduction to Literature
Lecture 12
Critical Thinking
intellectually disciplined process
actively and skillfully conceptualizing, applying,
analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating information
gathered from observation, experience, reflection,
reasoning, or communication
based on intellectual values such as clarity, accuracy,
consistency, relevance, depth, fairness
Critical Thinking
Involves
the skills detailed above
the intellectual commitment of using those skills to
guide behavior
fairmindedness
to avoid skillful manipulation of ideas
to avoid irrationality, prejudices, biases,
distortions, uncritically accepted social rules and
taboos, self-interest, and vested interest
to avoid thinking simplistically about
complicated issues
to consider appropriately the rights and needs of
others
Critical Thinking
In writing
To learn to articulate ideas properly
To accumulate data
To arrange data into an appropriate argumentative line
To learn how to refute mistaken, incorrect, erroneous
opinions
To learn how to draw a relevant conclusion from
premises
Style Guides
The formal requirements of a research paper
Joseph Gibaldi:
MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers
New York: The Modern Language Association of
America (7th edition)
Style Guides
Good writing
Involves
Grammar, structure, style
Mechanics, punctuation
Usage
Clarity, coherence, unity
in sentence structures
in developing paragraphs
Exposition, argument, persuasion
Conclusion
Abstract, summary
Planning, writing and presenting a critical
paper
The purpose is to enable the student to demonstrate
that
(1) she/he knows how to use libraries and other
sources effectively to locate relevant materials
(2) she/he can prepare and write up a sustained and
logically structured academic argument in clear
prose
(3) she/he can present her/his work well, using
appropriate scholarly conventions
Process
Deciding on a topic
Wide range of possible research topics
At BA and MA levels usually assigned to students
When the task is assigned, questions to be asked are:
What are the key studies in the field?
What kinds of approaches have been taken to the
subject?
Process
Turning a topic into an argument
To give a direction
To develop a set of questions to be answered or
problems to be solved in the paper
Information and data should be gathered in order to
answer the questions, solve the problems
A good paper takes the form of an argument
Process
Some ways of turning a topic into an argument
An argument for or against an existing critic or
critical position
An argument about the importance of a particular
influence on a writer or an influence exerted by
her/him
An argument turning upon the nature of the genre of
a work
An argument about the significance of a little-known
or undervalued author or work
An argument about some historical or literaryhistorical aspect of literature
Process
Working out a structure
Consider the question of length of the planned paper
Internal division of the argument into introduction,
elaboration, conclusion
The elaboration section may be divided into smaller
units
Development of the argument
Process
Preparing a research proposal
When registering for a BA thesis
Should contain:
Title
Argument – should be concise
Materials – should be presented more in detail (primary
sources, secondary sources)
Conclusion – provisional
References – key primary and secondary texts
Bibliography – all relevant primary and secondary texts
Process
Writing a paper
taking notes – techniques
from the first rough draft to the final version
format of the text
setting out references – acknowledge quotations
Critical genres
Review, criticism
Research paper, scholarly essay, personal
essay, brief notes, letter to the editor
Book chapter
Collection of essays, critical papers, reviews
Thesis, dissertation
Book, monograph
Donald Hall and Sven Birkerts
Writing Well
Longman 9th ed.
Beth S. Neman
Teaching Students to Write
Oxford University Press 2nd ed.
Critical Thinking
The Act of Writing
Writing with Purpose
Some magazines of literary criticism
The articles and books reviews are exemplary in their
layout, intellectual precision, competence, and
fairmindedness
Times Literary Supplement
founded in 1902
London Review of Books
founded in 1979
The New York Review of Books
founded in 1963
Periodicals with literary essays
• TLS The Times Literary Supplement
A.http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/a
rts_and_entertainment/the_tls/
• London Review of Books
http://www.lrb.co.uk/
• The New York Review of Books
http://www.nybooks.com/
JACQUES LEMARCHAND IN
‘FIGARO LITTERAIRE’
17 January 1953, 10
I do not quite know how to begin describing this play
by Samuel Beckett, ‘Waiting for Godot’ (directed by
Roger Blin, now playing at the Théâtre de Babylone). I
have seen this play and seen it again, I have read and
reread it: it still has the power to move me. I should
like to communicate this feeling, to make it contagious.
At the same time I am faced with the difficulty of
fulfilling the primary duty of the critic, which, as
everyone knows, is to explain and narrate a play to
people who have neither seen it nor read it. I have
experienced this difficulty several times before; the
sensation is infinitely agreeable. One feels it each time
JACQUES LEMARCHAND IN
‘FIGARO LITTERAIRE’
17 January 1953, 10
one is called upon to describe a work that is beautiful,
but of an unusual beauty; new, but genuinely new;
traditional, but of eminent tradition; clever, but with a
cleverness the most clever professors are unable to
teach; and finally, intelligent, but with that clear
Intelligence that is non-negotiable in the schools. In
addition, ‘Waiting for Godot’ is a resolutely comic play,
its comedy borrowed from the most direct of all forms
of humor, the circus.
The Broadway production of Waiting for Godot, which opened April 30 at
Studio 54, 2009.
The Roundabout Theatre Company's production of Samuel Beckett's
allegorical play stars Nathan Lane, Bill Irwin, and John Goodman.
Harold Hobson In ‘Sunday Times’ 7 August 1955, 11
Strange as the play is, and curious as are its processes
of thought, it has a meaning; and this meaning is
untrue. To attempt to put this meaning into a paragraph
is like trying to catch Leviathan in a butterfly net, but
nevertheless the effort must be made. The upshot of
‘Waiting for Godot’ is that the two tramps are always
waiting for the future, their ruinous consolation being
that there is always tomorrow; they never realise that
today is today. In this, says Mr. Beckett, they are like
humanity, which dawdles and drivels away its life,
postponing action, eschewing enjoyment, waiting only
for some far-off, divine event, the millenium, the Day of
Judgment.
Harold Hobson In ‘Sunday Times’ 7 August 1955, 11
Mr. Beckett has, of course, got it all wrong. Humanity
worries very little over the Day of Judgment. It is far
too busy hire-purchasing television sets, popping into
three-star restaurants, planting itself vineyards,
building helicopters. But he has got it wrong in a
Tremendous way. And this is what matters. There is no
need at all for a dramatist to philosophise rightly; he
can leave that to the philosophers. But it is essential
that if he philosophises wrongly, he should do so with
swagger. Mr. Beckett has any amount of swagger. A
dusty, coarse, irreverent, pessimistic, violent swagger?
Possibly. But the genuine thing, the real McCoy.
Nathan Lane, left, as Estragon and John Goodman as Pozzo
in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, at Studio 54, 2009
Postlewait, Thomas: “Self-Performing Voices: Mind, Memory, and
Time in Beckett's Drama. Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 24, No.
4 (Winter, 1978), pp. 473-491
Time is the burden in Beckett's drama-both as chronic
endurance and as recurrent theme. His characters
suffer time without being able to form it and
consciousness into a satisfying design. It does not
become for them, as it has throughout Western history,
a causal principle of existence, the soul and measure
of being: the Greek's Alpha and Omega-Chronos
(confused with Kronos), Heraclitus' river, Zeno's arrow,
Plato's moving image of eternity, Pindar's father of all
things, Aristotle's "number of motion in respect of
before and after," the Hebraic "Chronicles," the neo
Platonist's Nous or Cosmic Mind, St. Augustine's three
times (present of things past, memory; present of
Postlewait, Thomas: “Self-Performing Voices: Mind, Memory, and
Time in Beckett's Drama. Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 24, No.
4 (Winter, 1978), pp. 473-491
things present, sight; present of things future,
expectation) the medieval wheel of fortune, Petrarch's
devouring time with the hourglass, the Renaissance's
Father Time (half devouring demon, half eternal
principle), Spenser's mutability, Shakespeare's Time
of many faces (transience, death, decay, tyranny, sweet
remembrance, gloomy prospect of "tomorrow and
tomorrow and tomorrow," and historical record of
royal and national needs of purpose), Locke's
measurable idea of succession and idea of duration,
Newton's "absolute, true, and mathematical time,"
Hegel's dialectical march of the Absolute Idea, Marx's
Postlewait, Thomas: “Self-Performing Voices: Mind, Memory, and
Time in Beckett's Drama. Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 24, No.
4 (Winter, 1978), pp. 473-491
progression of economic history, Bergson's duration,
Proust's memory, Einstein's relativity, and throughout
history the pragmatist's Locks of Opportunity. None of
these holds consciousness together for Beckett's
characters. Shakespeare writes that time "nursest all
and murder'st all that are"; however, it does not even
do this in Beckett's drama. It simply runs on and on
without cause.
Postlewait, Thomas: “Self-Performing Voices: Mind, Memory, and
Time in Beckett's Drama. Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 24, No.
4 (Winter, 1978), pp. 473-491
To illustrate this, Beckett divides Waiting for Godot,
Happy Days, and Play into two days or parts that are
confusingly the same. And Endgame, while limited to
one day and act, is nevertheless the representation of
repetitive actions in a daily sequence. […]
Life is spent in anticipation of direction and
meaning, and when this does not arrive, then life is
spent in aimless routine and habit to pass the time of
day. The two main "actions" in Beckett's drama are
anticipation without much memory (Waiting for Godot)
and memory with much anticipation (Endgame). Most
of Beckett's short plays dramatize a mind or voice
recording in distant isolation the fragmented pieces of
Postlewait, Thomas: “Self-Performing Voices: Mind, Memory, and
Time in Beckett's Drama. Twentieth Century Literature, Vol. 24, No.
4 (Winter, 1978), pp. 473-491
memory that tumble out of consciousness as words,
words, and more disjointed words: Krapp's Last Tape,
Embers, Play, Eh Joe, Cascando, Not I, Footfalls, and
That Time.
Although the action in Waiting for Godot appears to
be random, especially from the characters' point of
view, the play is organized into a carefully controlled
plot. It unifies around two questions that recur
throughout the play: "Do you not remember?" and
"What are we waiting for?" That is, memory and
anticipation. The words "remember" and "waiting" are
constantly repeated in the play, closely matched by the
words "yesterday„ and "tomorrow."
Gordon, Lois: Reading Godot.
New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002, p
62
Beckett mirrors the paradoxes of existentialism — the
persistent need to act on precariously grounded
stages — with the repeated absence of denouement in
the enacted scenarios. Since much of act I, with its
series of miniplays, is repeated in the second act,
which concludes with an implicit return to act I, Beckett
creates a never-ending series of incomplete plays
within the larger drama, each of which lacks a
resolving deus ex machina. The paradox of purposive
action and ultimate meaninglessness pervades. A
deceptively simple boot routine is rationalized as
purposeful activity.
Waiting for Godot in New Orleans, 2008
Paul Chan’s production
Graver, Lawrence: Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, 20-21
The title, the sense of universal present time, the shape
of the plot and of the characters, the often pointed and
tantalizing allusions – these obviously invite allegorical
interpretation, and for many play goers and readers the
invitation has proved irresistible. It is also important to
remember that when Waiting for Godot was first
performed in the1950s, arguments about systems of
meaning were often influenced by a large body of
philosophical and fictional writing generally known as
existentialist, which seemed at first glance to have
marked similarities to Beckett’s work. Although not a
cohesive school, the existentialist writers were
Graver, Lawrence: Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, 20-21
preoccupied with many of the same vital issues, most
notably the problem of discovering belief in the face of
radical twentieth-century perceptions of the
meaningless or absurdity of human life.
A characteristic existentialist response was to
accept nothingness, absence, and absurdity as given
sand then to explore the way human beings might self
consciously form their essence in the course of the
lives they choose to lead. The origin of the inclination
for transcendence was little agreed upon by such
writers as Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert
Camus, and Karl aspers; but as Richard Shepard has
described it, ‘a radically negative experience is seen to
Graver, Lawrence: Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, 20-21
contain the embryo of a positive development – though
the psychological and philosophical content of that
development is extremely diverse’ (Fowler, p. 82).
The pervasiveness of existentialist thinking in the
1940s and 1950s was so great that any work about an
individual’s quest for purpose and order in life,
especially in relation to an absent or a present divinity,
was likely to be discussed in the context of current
controversies about existence, essence, personal
freedom, responsibility, and commitment. Many
philosophers who were not existentialists were also
absorbed by these same questions.
Graver, Lawrence: Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, 20-21
For instance, Simone Weil, who coincidentally
had been a student at l’Ecole normale superieure when
Beckett lectured there, published a widely-read book,
Attente de Dieu (Waiting for God), just at the time that
Beckett and Roger Blin were trying to stage En
attendant Godot. Yet there seems to have been no
direct connection with or influence of either writer on
the other. The issues were in the air.
Worton, Michael: “Waiting for Godot and Endgame: Theatre as
Text”. In: Pilling, John, ed.: The Cambridge Companion to Beckett.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp 67-87
Beckett's first two published plays constitute a crux, a
pivotal moment in the development of modern Western
theatre. In refusing both the psychological realism of
Chekhov, Ibsen and Strindberg and the pure
theatricality of the body advocated by Artaud, they
stand as significant transitional works as well as major
works in themselves. The central problem they pose is
what language can and cannot do. Language is no
longer presented as a vehicle for direct communication
or as a screen through which one can see darkly
the psychic movements of a character.
Worton, Michael: “Waiting for Godot and Endgame: Theatre as
Text”. In: Pilling, John, ed.: The Cambridge Companion to Beckett.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp 67-87
Rather it is used in all its grammatical, syntactic and –
especially - intertextual force to make the reader/
spectator aware of how much we depend on language
and of how much we need to be wary of the
codifications that language imposes upon us.
Explaining why he turned to theatre, Beckett once
wrote: 'When I was working on Watt, I felt the need to
create for a smaller space, one in which I had some
control of where people stood or moved, above all of a
certain light. I wrote Waiting for Godot.‘ This desire for
control is crucial and determines the shape of
Beckett's last theatrical works; the notion that
Worton, Michael: “Waiting for Godot and Endgame: Theatre as
Text”. In: Pilling, John, ed.: The Cambridge Companion to Beckett.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp 67-87
the space created in - and by - the playscript is smaller
than that of the novel, however, needs urgent and
Interrogative attention. It is undeniable that, having
chosen to write in French in order to avoid the
temptation of lyricism, Beckett was working with and
against the Anglo-Irish theatrical tradition of ironic and
comic realism (notably Synge, Wilde, Shaw, Behan).
However, his academic studies had led him to a
familiarity with the French Symbolist theories of
theatre — all of which contest both French Classical
notions of determinism and the possibilities of the
theatre as a bourgeois art-form. (68-69)
Banville, John: “The Painful Comedy of Samuel
Beckett”. New York Review of Books, November 14,
1996
Reviewing among others:
Damned to Fame: The Life of Samuel Beckett by
James Knowlson. Simon and Schuster
Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist by Anthony
Cronin. HarperCollins
The World of Samuel Beckett, 1906-1946 by Lois
Gordon. Yale University Press
Banville, John: “The Painful Comedy of Samuel
Beckett”. New York Review of Books, November 14,
1996
However different their approaches, Knowlson, Cronin,
and Gordon have a common intention, which is to
present in a more appealing light the personality and
work of an artist who is too often seen as
unapproachably difficult, pessimistic, and
misanthropic. At a certain level, all biographies are
also autobiographies. Thus Knowlson’s Beckett is not
only a great writer but also a kind of super academic, a
man steeped in world literature, a paragon of
scholarship and learning. Cronin’s Beckett, on the
other hand, is a dedicated working artist, not at all as
disengaged from the world as he liked to pretend, or as
Banville, John: “The Painful Comedy of Samuel
Beckett”. New York Review of Books, November 14,
1996
his admirers preferred to believe, an Irishman fond of a
drop, a ladies’ man who would sooner essay a song
than talk “balls” (a favorite Beckett word) to the likes of
Professor Knowlson. In Gordon’s version, Beckett is
caught up in and to a large extent shaped by the
history of his time, the great events of which are
reflected, however obliquely, in his work. All three
versions, complementary rather than contradictory, are
more or less persuasive, and although few non
specialist readers may be prepared to plough their way
through all three of these books, taken together they
do provide a remarkably rounded picture of a deeply
mysterious artist.
Summary: Forms
News media: scandals, celebrations, promotions
Authority issues: censorship, publication rights
Format: journals, magazines, collections,
monographs
online, printed
Education: papers, exams, theses, dissertations
presentations
Audiences: specialised or lay readership
Styles: formal, informal from academic writing to
blogs
The literary essay
Flexible form – formal or informal
when informal: ideas are
presented
and argued
supported by
quotations
History of the essay as a literary kind
The academic essay
Tends to be formal, with a set of rules
depending on the area of expertise
Essays within various disciplines covered by
SEAS:
http://seas3.elte.hu/seas/research/publicati
ons.html
Examples from DES
• angolPark
http://seas3.elte.hu/angolpark/
• The AnaChronisT
http://anachronist.atw.hu/
Style guide for literature:
e.g., MLA Handbook for Writers of
Research Papers (Joseph Gibaldi)
For a seminar paper
• Check requirements of instructor, concerning
theme, content, method, form
• Select a work or a problem that is of interest to
you.
• Choose a title that describes a question or
problem.
• Collect the points that you want to make, and
build an argument from them.
• Support your points and arguments by
quotations from the work(s) in question, using
critical sources as well. Always provide the
• In the introduction explain what you want to do,
such as analyse a book from a certain point of
view; compare the treatment of a problem in two
or more works; describe a feature of an author's
style or other strategy in two or more works by the
same author; discuss a more theoretical question
of literature using works as examples. Problems to
discuss and features to analyse include narration,
characterisation, structure, style, motifs, use of
symbols, treatment of social or moral issues.
• Then go ahead and write an interesting,
argumentative paper
• In your conclusion summarise your results. What
have you learnt from all your work? How could you
sum up your most important discoveries for
someone new to your topic?
Papers at exams
• Concentrate on the text
• Focus on the question/theme/title
specified
• Remember helpful ideas from criticism or
other works
• Try to establish connections between
literary texts, between texts and ideas,
between texts and criticism
• Present an argumentation
If you want to test yourself
Give a one-line definition of the following terms:
• iambic pentameter
• narrator
• conflict in drama
Give a one-paragraph definition of one of the
following terms:
• narrative voice
• elegy
Now for a 15-minute task
Choose one of the following two extracts
and
• list possible ways you could analyse the
piece
• choose one approach and actually carry
out the analysis
Please find extracts on the next slide.
extract No 1
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the
infant,
...
• Shakespeare "As You Like It" II.vll.
extract No 2
I am the poet of the body and I am the poet of
the Soul,
The pleasures of heaven are with me and the
pains of hell are with me,
The first I graft and increase upon myself, the
latter I translate into a new tongue.
Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself”
Section
21
http://www.princeton.edu/~batke/logr/log_026.h
tml
Now see what you have done
• Did you write all 3 one-line definitions?
• Did you notice that you only had to write a
one-paragraph definition on 1 topic?
• Did you notice that you had to list possible
analytical approaches to one of the two
texts only?
• Did you remember to do the list, as well as
choose one approach to elaborate?