Develop an informed understanding of literature and/or language using critical texts (AS 91479)
Domain: Develop an informed understanding of literature and/or language using critical texts - AS 91479, internal, 4 credits. You read secondary material - scholarly essays, reviews, lectures, commentary on language use - and use it to sharpen your own reading of a literary or language text.
Evaluating a critical source
- Who wrote it, where was it published, and when? A 1970s reading may assume critical assumptions now contested.
- What is the writer's stance or theoretical lens, and what does it make them notice or miss?
- Is the argument supported with evidence from the primary text, or is it assertion?
- Who is the intended reader - specialist, student, general public?
Using critics well
Attribute every borrowed idea: 'As Bennett argues...' Then agree, qualify or challenge with your own evidence. Distinguish the critic's voice from yours. Two critics who disagree are more useful than two who agree, because the disagreement shows you where the interpretive decisions lie. Synthesise: what does your reading of the critics let you say about the text that you could not say before?
Worked example
Two essays on a novel's ending: one reads it as redemption, one as irony. Reasoning: check the evidence each marshals - the redemption reading leans on the final image of light, the irony reading on the narrator's earlier self-deception being repeated in that image. Weigh which accounts for more of the text, then offer a position: the ending is deliberately unresolved, and the light is visible only to a narrator we have learned to distrust. That is informed understanding, not a summary of critics.
Traps
Treating a critic as an authority to be quoted rather than tested; uncited paraphrase, which is plagiarism; letting critics replace your own analysis; ignoring the source's date or bias.