Asking Critical Questions of a Literary Text

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a literature major is good preparation for law school. You can also get it wrong – especially if you’ve misread the factual basis of the text – so you have to proceed with caution and an open mind.

3. The third type of question is evaluative. This is one of the least useful types of questions because it involves judging the text on the basis of something outside it – usually applying your own moral or ethical background to evaluate or judge the text. An evaluative question, for example, would be whether Tim did the right thing by going to war, or whether Lavender deserved his death because of his lackadaisical attitude toward war. We are judging their behavior based on our own sense of what’s right and wrong. Rather than judging the characters or the authors, we should instead direct our inquiry toward discovering why the characters or authors behaved or wrote as they did. What were they trying to show their readers?

Evaluative questions are not useful because they tend not to be arguable/discussable.

When you are reading any of the texts this semester, keep your antennae up – look for things that make you ask why – why did he do that? Why is this experience explained in this type of language? Why is it set in this period? Why are there so many references to listening/speaking/silence? Why did the author spend so long describing the landscape?

Those questions are the entryway into the text – they act as a shovel that will help you get under the surface and into the subtext. Ask the questions and then rethink the text looking for clues that will help you answer those questions.

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