Theorizing

389

Some literary criticism is concerned with such theoretical questions as these:

What is tragedy? Can the hero be a villain? How does tragedy differ from melodrama?

Why do tragedies — works showing good or at least interesting people destroyed — give us pleasure?

Does a work of art — a play or a novel, say, a made-up world with imagined characters — offer anything that can be called “truth”? Does our experience of a work of art affect our character?

Does a work of art have meaning in itself, or is the meaning simply whatever anyone wishes to say it is? Does Macbeth tell us anything about life, or is it just an invented story?

And, yet again, one hopes that anyone asserting a thesis concerned with any of these topics will offer evidence — will, indeed, argue rather than merely assert.

A CHECKLIST FOR AN ARGUMENT ABOUT LITERATURE

  • Is my imagined reader like a typical classmate of mine, someone who is not a specialist in literature but who is open-minded and interested in hearing my point of view about a work?

  • Is the essay supported with evidence, usually from the text itself but conceivably from other sources (such as a statement by the author, a statement by a person regarded as an authority, or perhaps the evidence of comparable works)?

  • Is the essay inclusive? Does it take into account all relevant details (which is not to say that it includes everything the writer knows about the work — for instance, that it was made into a film or that the author died poor)?

  • Is the essay focused? Does the thesis stay steadily before the reader?

  • Does the essay use quotations, but as evidence, not as padding? Whenever possible, does it abridge or summarize long quotations?

  • Are all sources fully acknowledged? (For the form of documentation, see Chapter 7.)