English Literature

A Student Guide

Martin Stephen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317876373
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

Now appearing in its third edition, Martin Stephen's classic text and course companion to English literature has been thoroughly revised and updated, taking account of the changes which have occurred in the subject since publication of the second edition.

CHAPTER ONE

Study and examination techniques in English literature

Introduction

English literature is, arguably, the most enjoyable, the most creative and perhaps even the most individual of all the standard academic disciplines. It might therefore seem a killer to start this book with a chapter on examination technique, rather similar to mentioning a funeral at a christening. We all know examinations have to come, just as we all know we are going to die, but to mention the stark truth at the start of a book or the start of a life might be seen as very insensitive.

The reason for doing so is simple. Everyone reading this book will have received at some time in their life a new computer or board game. The game comes with instructions on how to play. They are often quite difficult to master, but once mastered they make the game fun, and they make it playable. Every academic subject has its own rules and regulations – remember the hours spent in Science lessons learning how to present the results of a practical? English has fewer than many, but they act in the same fashion as the rules of the game. Know the rules and you can enjoy playing it; fail to learn them and you could spend hours and get nowhere. This chapter is an instruction book – and as they say with every game, a few moments spent studying it will greatly increase your enjoyment …!

What follows does not distinguish between the various levels of learning a student might have, be they studying for A-level, at University or a mature student. It assumes total ignorance on the part of the reader, and if that makes it appear rather similar to the dummy’s guides that one can find on the market for various computer programmes it is not intended to call the reader a dummy. What it is intended to do is to recognise that the ‘formal’ disciplines of how to write on and about English literature are taught less and less often in schools and colleges, and never taught at University. The result is a black hole of ignorance into which a number of students tend to fall, where teaching the basic disciplines of the subject becomes a classic S.E.P., or Somebody Else’s Problem.

The major method by which literature candidates are examined is the essay, with variations that are discussed below. Before discussing the various types of essay question it is essential to grasp the basic principles and conventions that govern almost all essay writing.

What is the examiner looking for?

‘It’s so vague!’ is the most common complaint from students facing up to writing a literature essay, the alleged vagueness being in what the question is actually demanding from the candidate. There will always be a degree of vagueness in the questions set on a subject such as English Literature, which requires a significant element of personal response from a student. This is compounded by the fact that the rules and regulations of essay writing itself will always be a little vaguer than for a number of other forms of written examination. Nevertheless, the degree of uncertainty that you face in interpreting and answering questions can be significantly reduced.

Most important of all, distinguish between what happens when you read a book for personal pleasure, and what happens when you read it for an examination. In the first case you can think what you like about the book, and will probably first of all decide whether or not you enjoy it. Words such as ‘boring’ or ‘interesting’ are the first ones that are likely to spring to mind. When you read a book for an examination these are the last things you should think of. It is a bonus if you enjoy a book, but what the examiner wants to know is if you have understood it; a very different thing. When you read a book that you will be examined on you are reading it to judge or find out what the author wanted to say or achieve in that book (the content), and to expose the techniques or methods by which he or she went about that aim (the form). Again, you can think what you like about a book when you read it as part of an examination course; the difference from personal reading is that in literary criticism you have to be able to justify or prove everything you think by reference to the text. You will be reading the work of creative or imaginative writers, but your essay will need a style more akin to that of a lawyer, presenting a viewpoint and then establishing it through firm evidence, than to that of an author. It follows that with any essay there are certain basic dos and don’ts.

Style

Write on an author, not like him or her! Flowery language, magnificent similes and metaphors, long words, and intricate sentence structure often interfere with an examination candidate’s aims more than they help. Simplicity, clarity, and economy are the most valuable stylistic features in any literary essay. One of the most common mistakes is to use a flowery or ornate style, and to go for the sound of an essay over its content. One example is:

This question is one of the most difficult of all to answer, and I propose to look at both sides of the case before proceeding to my conclusion. What are we to think of this issue? The multi-layered phenomenon of a great tragedy with its eponymous hero and final catharsis presents such a magnitude of experience that only excessive insight can provoke a final and complete understanding …

Convinced? You shouldn’t be. The problem with this is that it does not say anything. You might usefully note a number of other points on style:

1. Never say how difficult the question is, or that you cannot make up your mind on it. You are only stating the obvious or displaying to the examiner the fact that you are inadequate.

2. Never ask questions in an essay; your task is to answer them.

3. Never write gobbledygook, or language so puffed-up as to be incomprehensible.

4. Never use words because they ‘sound good’; it is what they mean that matters.

5. Never use a word unless you are absolutely sure of what it means. Certain words and phrases should be avoided at all costs, such as ‘brilliant’, ‘terrific’, ‘nice’, ‘nasty’, ‘naughty’, ‘boring’, and ‘super’. Try to use ‘however’ as little as possible, and never as a conjunction.

6. Never try to ram your argument down an examiner’s throat. Saying something many times over is not the same as proving it, so writing ‘No one could deny that…’ or ‘It is absolutely obvious that…’ achieves nothing. In practice most students only say things like this when they are actually quite unsure of what they should think.

7. Never patronise or condescend to the reader, or try to show off your knowledge, as in ‘When one has studied the book in great depth, and thought long and hard over it…’; the examiner expects you to have done all that, and does not need telling. It is the weight of your arguments that wins marks, not the loudness of your voice.

Answering the question

The single most common cause of failure to write an effective answer is failure to answer the question. This usually takes two forms. The first is where the student writes an answer to the question he wants to be asked, instead of writing an answer to the question he has been asked. The second is where the student gives a plot summary, or piles up details of the story, instead of answering the specific question as set. A long, rambling account of the plot gets you nowhere; the examiner can find the plot when he reads the book, and does not need you to tell it to him. It is what you make of the plot that matters, not your knowledge of it. Your essay should contain quotations from the text and references to incidents in it, but only as back-up or evidence for a point you are making.

Ask yourself at all times if what you are writing down is wholly and totally relevant to the question you have been set. If the examiner ever has cause to want to write down ‘So what?’ in the margin of your answer, you will almost certainly lose marks. The examiner wants to see that you can choose the few relevant facts from a mass of information, and then apply them to a specific area of the text and its content. Nor is it enough merely to provide relevant information: you have to show the examiner why it is relevant. Very often candidates will put down a quotation and just leave it, wrongly assuming that it is obvious why it is there in the essay. It never is obvious: you should always explain why you have chosen to include a quotation, or a reference to an incident or character.

A major help in making sure that you are answering the question is the use of the topic or theme sentence. This is always the first sentence in any paragraph, and in it you make sure that you have summed up exactly and precisely what that paragraph is going to be about. Thus each paragraph falls into three sections:

1. The topic sentence which sums up the statement made in that paragraph;

2. Some more lines to elaborate on that topic or theme;

3. Quotation and evidence to prove it.

Many candidates find this a difficult technique, because we are conditioned to think of a conclusion as something that comes at the end, and a topic sentence is in a way a summary of an argument or viewpoint – yet it comes at the start of a paragraph. There is a good reason for this. If you start your paragraph with a great long list of evidence for a certain point you wish to make, the examiner cannot judge whether or not this evidence is relevant to the point you are trying to make and the question you have been asked to answer. He or she needs to know what you are trying to say before he can judge your evidence, and so by far the best technique is to provide him with this before you get into detail. If you look at the plan for your essay and cannot think of a sentence to sum up what the paragraph is trying to say, it is probably that the paragraph is saying nothing at all, and needs to be re-thought. Equally, a glance at your topic sentence and a glance at the essay title tells you immediately if the content of that paragraph is relevant to the question.

Punctuating the title

The title of a book or poem is always given special punctuation in an essay to mark it out from the rest of the text. First of all, find out the correct title of the book you are studying, and how to punctuate it; this is on the fly leaf or title page of the book, and may not be what is printed on the spine. The title of a book or play should be underlined throughout, if you are writing by hand, or put in italics if you are using a word-processor. The title of an individual poem should be placed in inverted commas, whichever method you are using. Some other useful points on punctuation and presentation are:

1. Never underline and put inverted commas round a title if you are handwriting, or underline and put in italics if you are using a word processor; you can have too much of a good thing.

2. Never write a title out in a different coloured ink – examiners do not mark you on artistic skills, and you do not have the time to change pens in an examination. Never use more than one font if you are word-processing, and make it a standard one such as Times New Roman or Arial, for the same reasons.

3. Use single-spacing, or 1.5 line spacing if the piece you are writing will be written on by whoever reads it and returned to you.

4. Always write the title out in full. Shakespeare wrote Much Ado About Nothing, not Much Ado; Tom Stoppard wrote Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, not Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

5. Start each word of the title with a capital letter, unless the title page of the book does it differently, as in The History of Mr Polly, where the ‘of’ does not require a capital. As with all rules, it helps to understand why it is necessary. The answer is that it can cause terrible confusion if the examiner thinks you mean Hamlet the character when actually you mean Hamlet the play; similarly, words in a poem sometimes appear as the title, and the examiner needs to know if you are talking about the whole poem, or individual lines f...