The Secondary Source Conflict
A student researching a novel's treatment of colonial memory has found two critics who disagree. Critic X (a 2008 article in a peer-reviewed journal) argues the novel ultimately reinforces colonial nostalgia through its elegiac tone. Critic Y (a 2020 chapter in an edited collection) argues the novel critiques nostalgia by making the elegiac tone visibly inadequate to what it mourns. Both cite the same closing scene. The student's draft currently says: 'Critics disagree about the novel's ending, which shows the novel is ambiguous.' The student has 2,000 words and has quoted each critic once, without comment. The teacher has asked her to 'take a position'.
1. Explain why the student's current treatment of the critics is analytically weak, and what 'taking a position' requires.
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The draft converts a substantive critical conflict into a vague observation that the novel is ambiguous. This is weak for three reasons.
First, 'critics disagree, therefore the text is ambiguous' is a non sequitur. Disagreement among critics is normal and does not establish that the text is indeterminate; it may instead show that one reading is stronger. The student has used the existence of debate as a substitute for entering it.
Second, quoting each critic once without comment treats sources as decoration. A quotation must be analysed: what claim does Critic X make, what evidence supports it, and how does Critic Y's reading of the same scene differ? The student has not engaged with the shared evidence, which is the crux.
Third, 'taking a position' requires the student to adjudicate - to argue that one reading better accounts for the textual evidence, or to propose a synthesis that explains why both critics see something real but misdescribe it. Ambiguity can be a conclusion, but only if argued, not asserted as a way of avoiding the conflict.
2. Outline a defensible position the student could take, and explain how she should deploy the two critics to support it.
Read the worked answer
A defensible position: the novel's elegiac tone is deliberately inadequate, and the text signals that inadequacy through the gap between the narrator's mourning and what the closing scene withholds. This broadly aligns with Critic Y but strengthens the claim by answering Critic X.
The deployment:
- Critic X is presented as the strongest counter-case, not dismissed. The student concedes that the elegiac register is genuinely present and can produce nostalgia in a reader who does not notice the gap. This concession makes her argument credible.
- The shared closing scene is where the student does her own work: she analyses the specific details - what is described, what is omitted, where the syntax falters - to show that the tone is undercut from within. This is her evidence, not the critics'.
- Critic Y supports the reading but is used to extend, not merely echo: the student can argue Y identifies the critique but understates how the narrator's own investment complicates it.
The structure should be: state the conflict, analyse the scene independently, show which reading it better supports and why, then acknowledge what the losing reading still explains. This is adjudication rather than summary.