Writing a critical essay: A practical guide for students

Sustaining all critical effort is the whole matter of suasion, especially given that no writing is without intent. If writing is not an end in itself, reading cannot be. Reading is a quest both for pleasure and for persuasive material. Each text, upon completion, remains in the balance until it is tipped into oblivion or relevance by the studied verdict of readership – criticism. And that verdict is particular to each reader and each context. Texts therefore undergo a new birth each time they are (re)read. Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952) owes its life in African letters to the critical act, in other words the aesthetic verdict, of a singular reader, Dylan Thomas. Tutuola’s manuscript had suffered cryptic rejection in the hands of English publishers until Faber and Faber sent it to Dylan Thomas, then one of its external readers. The result was the birth of one of African literature’s most signifying texts. We open our statement with this hermeneutic reflection the better to alert the intending student of criticism to the nature of his assignment, and the teacher of criticism to the formative responsibility he bears.