Hey, everyone!
New syllabus, new critics! While having critics in Module B isn't compulsory, incorporating quotes from them in your critical study will deepen your engagement with the text and elevate the quality of your responses. By completing critical readings, you can gain a greater impression on the effectiveness of the text's construction and how it has literary value that is bound to endure.
Last year, I created a bank of critic quotes which I found highly enjoyable to do and hopefully helpful to those who accessed it. I'm aiming to start off a thread similarly for the new Module B prescribed texts as an ongoing resource that I'll add to leading up to the HSC.
For those studying T.S Eliot, I compiled a bunch of critic quotes last year for the previous syllabus that are more than still applicable today! You can access it
here!For today's entry, I've compiled quotes for the selected novels on the syllabus. The prescribed texts are Jane Austen's
Emma, Charles Dickens'
Great Expectations and Kazuo Ishiguro's
An Artist of the Floating World.
Jane Austen's EmmaÖzlem Karadağ, 2011"The reader, identifying with Emma, falls to the same traps as Emma do, it is not only Emma’s failure but also reader’s who has to learn through the novel not to be prejudiced and preconditioned, Austen proves that together with her characters, her reader also misreads and misinterprets."
"Through misreading and misjudgements of Emma and the others around her, Austen shows that faults are a part of everybody’s character"
"This is what makes her art and characters timeless; they represent our own selves to us."
Robert McCrum, 2013"perfected the art of free indirect speech to convey the inner life of her heroine while retaining her control of the narrative as the omniscient author."
"Austen's mature delight in her milieu."
"fully in command of her genre, Austen revels in her characters and their foibles."
"Emma...makes a timeless appeal to the reader's better nature."
Marta Bausells, 2015"full of gems that are often ironically brilliant and applicable to modern life, and sometimes amusingly dated – but always worth revisiting."
John Mullan, 2015"The novel bent narration through the distorting lens of its protagonist’s mind."
"Austen miraculously combined the internal and the external."
"Austen’s idiosyncratic punctuation, that system of exclamation marks and dashes, allows for a kind of dramatised thought process."
"The novel’s stylistic innovations allow it to explore not just a character’s feelings, but, comically, her deep ignorance of her own feelings."
"she simply lets us inhabit Emma’s consciousness, simply lets us see the world according to Emma."
"she has the rare and difficult art of dramatic presentation: instead of telling us what her characters are, and what they feel, she presents the people, and they reveal themselves."
Charles Dickens' Great ExpectationsSamuel Hollyer, 1861"In Great Expectations there is shown a power of external observation finer and deeper"
Alison Light, 2002"It is an intimate account of learning your place, of class as a feeling but also as character formation, something that goes on inside."
"full of warnings to upstarts and mockery of their pretensions."
Sarah Waters, 2003"for a considerable driving force behind much Victorian fiction was the attempt to make sense of modern life precisely by tracing through it chains of causality and connection"
"Dickens in particular was supremely good at excavating the submerged and sometimes fatal intimacies between people of different classes and clans."
"With his direct appeal to the reader, Dickens bursts through the textual membrane of his novel and, paradoxically, draws us closer to the heart of Pip's imaginary emotional life."
"we come to it as to a community of readers; that it speaks to us in the most intimate and yet the most public of ways, in voices which have retained their extraordinary clarity and pertinence across decades of change."
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, 2011"To open Great Expectations is to enter a world in which events are often caught only out of the corner of the narrator's eye."
"to be fond of a novel that so perfectly reflects its author's restless, rummaging imagination."
David Denby, 2016"there are moments when Dickens’s grasp of absurdity and decrepitude makes him our contemporary, or at least a modern writer"
Kazuo Ishiguro's An Artist of the Floating WorldTan Twan Eng, 2013"Ono's narrative drifts and eddies into extended digressions into the past before looping back to the present."
"the reliability of Ono's recollection is suspect."
"view Ono – and the world – in a slightly altered light."
John Pistelli, 2014"Ishiguro intensifies his novel’s ironies when he hints strongly that Ono has overrated the importance of his own complicity in the depredations of the World War II era."
"Ishiguro warns the reader, then, that the politicized artist will not only commit evil deeds—such as Ono’s informing on Kuroda—but will also remain as ineffectual as he would have been had he remained apolitical."
Robert McCrum, 2015"Kazuo Ishiguro’s study of guilt, ageing and solitude in postwar, post-imperial Japan is a tour de force of unreliable narration"
"An Artist of the Floating World presents, with the menace of an almost dream-like calm, the reminiscences of a retired painter in the aftermath of a national disaster."
"The tragedy implicit in the book is that Ono’s long digressions into the past revert, inexorably, to the troubles of the present."
Iain Maloney, 2015"Ono is an unreliable narrator, disguising his motives and spinning recollections to portray himself more favorably."
""An Artist of the Floating World” is a sensitive examination of the turmoil in postwar Japan, a time when certainties were overturned"
"seen through the eyes of a man who is rejected by the future and who chooses to reject his own past."