hi, i have to write an essay on the following question:

How far have you found that critical ideas have encouraged you to acknowledge that a text may be contradictory and lacking in unity?
Your essay should discuss some of the ways in which specific literary critical theories have developed an awareness of the multiplicity and endless meaning produced in a text.

The texts we have studied are Jane Eyre and Wide Sargasso Sea. This essay has to be between 2000 and 3000 words and i havent a clue where to start or what to include. Can anyone help? Are there any websites that can? Thanx!

And what are the critical theories you have studied?

Does your instructor really write that way? My sympathies.

TJ, this site might help you with Jane Eyre:

[www.sparknotes.com]


Les

Isn't that the one Pam reads once every year? Prolly better than Sparknotes.

TJ,

Wasn't an earlier assignment to look at these books using feminist and other theories? How did that assignment come out?

That might give you a basis for this assignment- if you look at these books through a given theory, how does the reading differ from either reading for pleasure, or by using a different theory?

pam

Thank goodness we weren't obliged at my school to subordinate ourselves to some ratbag political theory when reading and commenting on English literature. It reminds me of a verse that appeared in 'Punch' after the publication of a study of Shakesperean Tragedies by a famous critic of yore, one Mr A.C.Bradley:

I dreamed last night that Shakespeare's ghost
Sat for a civil service post.
The English paper of that year
Contained a question on King Lear
Which Shakespeare answered very badly
Because he hadn't studied Bradley.

hi, the theories that i've studied are marxism, feminism, psychoanalytical and intertexuality.

Hope this helps!

There's a story by Isaac Asimov where a writer comes back to school, studies his own work, (without anyone knowing that it's his work) and fails the final.

pam

I have heard several anti-establishment poets of the mid-20th century express their horror at discovering their work on the exams syllabus and therefore now 'mainstream'. In the 19th century artists were similarly disparaging of the contents of the Royal Academy until they were asked to exhibit in middle age. I think it would be rather fun to read pudits believe you were supposed to have been thinking about and reflecting in your work and compare it with what you really felt about it when you wrote it. In extreme old age you probably wouldn't be able to distinguish the one from the other.

I go to Eton College

I know everything

I'm not going to help you

Has Eton run out of periods at this late date? Or, full stops, as you blokes say.

Well, no need to write them down if you know they're there, right? And as he knows everything, he knows they're there. So, Hugh, be nice with this eton bloke who has nothing left to live for. God, must be awful knowing everything. Poor kid.