Module B Critic Quotes (2019-2023)

[angewina_naguen]

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 Emma
Özlem 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 Expectations
Samuel 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 World
Tan 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."

[chuchesta]

Thank you so much!!!!

[angewina_naguen]

Hey, everyone!

For those with Catholic Trials today, hope Paper 2 treats you well  I'm diving into film very early this morning before uni starts with some critic quotes for George Clooney's Good Night, And Good Luck! There doesn't seem to be much available on this text but I will add more if I come across anything interesting 

George Clooney's Good Night, And Good Luck
A.O. Scott, 2005
""Good Night, and Good Luck" plunges into a half-forgotten world"
"unfolds, cinéma-vérité style, in the fast, sometimes frantic present tense, following Murrow and his colleagues as they deal with the petty annoyances and larger anxieties of news gathering at a moment of political turmoil."
""Good Night, and Good Luck" brilliantly recreates the milieu of early television...captures...the weirdly hermetic atmosphere of a news organization at a time of crisis."
"Most of the discussion of this movie will turn on its content -- on the history it investigates and on its present-day resonance."

Philip French, 2006
"The movie is immaculately shot in black and white to capture the period sense"
"uses the past to make today's media and their audiences address their responsibilities"

Howard Caulfield, 2007
"The lighting combined with the black and white color scheme in the film gives it a neo-noir appeal, and this is appropriate considering the time period and political climate."
"Considering the political climate of today, Good Night, and Good Luck is Clooney’s thesis that external influence over news is not only dangerous, but leads to wide-spread hysteria and eventual chaos."

Kevin Moloney, 2011
"has been described since its release as an analogy of the environment of fear fueled by the George W. Bush administration fifty years later"

Michael Meyer, 2011
"the film’s ability to convey the culture of fear engendered by McCarthyism"
"this multitude of villains that allows Good Night to exist as a character-driven story rather than a morality play."
"Murrow’s lesson is that public trust has to be spent, even endangered, in order to be built up."

[Coolmate]

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 Emma
Özlem 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 Expectations
Samuel 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 World
Tan 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."

Hey angewina_naguen!

Thanks so much for this resource! I am in year 11 and am wondering how I would incorporate a critic in an essay?, do you insert it in instead of a quote or do you put them in the first sentence? and how would you write it to make it sound sophisticated.

Cheers, Coolmate 

[angewina_naguen]

Hey angewina_naguen!

Thanks so much for this resource! I am in year 11 and am wondering how I would incorporate a critic in an essay?, do you insert it in instead of a quote or do you put them in the first sentence? and how would you write it to make it sound sophisticated.

Cheers, Coolmate 

Hey, Coolmate!

So to clarify first off, critic quotes aren't actually compulsory to use! However, they are highly recommended in Module B to enhance critical thinking and to give your responses from more depth. They should be incorporated to elevate your argument and support your synthesis in the body paragraphs. I've shown an example of how it's done below in the spoiler.

An Artist of the Floating World Sample

...The inclusive language created with the plural pronoun “Our nation” and the indefinite pronoun in “One can only wish these young people well” enables the author to finally renounce Ono from his narrator role, extending the aspirations of a flourishing society to the contemporary context. While the novel is indeed a “sensitive examination of the turmoil in postwar Japan, a time when certainties were overturned” (Iain Maloney, 2015), Ishiguro deliberately illuminates glimpses of success amid the stasis and despair to encourage readers to empathise and speculate with optimism on the future. Thus, the text seeks to not only acknowledge uncomfortable truths for empathy, but can be appreciated from its resonance with our continual ambitions, striving for the betterment of humanity today.

Basically, it should almost be seamless in how you integrate it! Hope that makes sense 

Angelina 

[Coolmate]

Hey, Coolmate!

So to clarify first off, critic quotes aren't actually compulsory to use! However, they are highly recommended in Module B to enhance critical thinking and to give your responses from more depth. They should be incorporated to elevate your argument and support your synthesis in the body paragraphs. I've shown an example of how it's done below in the spoiler.

An Artist of the Floating World Sample

...The inclusive language created with the plural pronoun “Our nation” and the indefinite pronoun in “One can only wish these young people well” enables the author to finally renounce Ono from his narrator role, extending the aspirations of a flourishing society to the contemporary context. While the novel is indeed a “sensitive examination of the turmoil in postwar Japan, a time when certainties were overturned” (Iain Maloney, 2015), Ishiguro deliberately illuminates glimpses of success amid the stasis and despair to encourage readers to empathise and speculate with optimism on the future. Thus, the text seeks to not only acknowledge uncomfortable truths for empathy, but can be appreciated from its resonance with our continual ambitions, striving for the betterment of humanity today.

Basically, it should almost be seamless in how you integrate it! Hope that makes sense 

Angelina 

Hi angewina_naguen!

Thankyou so much for your response! This makes a lot more sense to me now (I was a bit confused), and thanks for the example! 

Thanks, Coolmate 

[angewina_naguen]

Hey, everyone!

In the spirit of our HSC revision lectures, I'm back with more critic quotes! This post has quotes for Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House which I've sourced from some articles that I think will be useful for illustrating textual integrity and supporting your critical analysis.

Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House
Susanna Rustin, 2013
"the combination of the play's brisk and thriller-like plotting, and the sense shared by everyone involved that the play still speaks to audiences in ways that feel fresh and interesting"
"the things Ibsen writes mean it ceases to be about a particular milieu...These are universal anxieties, and it seems from talking to people that it resonates in the most visceral way"

W.B. Gooderham, 2017
"Ultimately, A Doll’s House offers no easy answers. Rather, it tells of the difficult, and yes, defiant, choices one must make before one is able to start asking questions."

Hope Morris, 2018
"leaving audiences with uncertainties about the meaning of family, morality and personal responsibility."
"The play explores themes that are relevant to every human being affected by the tug of society’s marionette strings."
"The play is timely as we find ourselves still in a society where the pressure of outward appearances shapes our lives."

[Abbylily]

Hey just wondering if you have any critic quotes for King Henry IV part 1?

[dani01]

 

Hey just wondering if you have any critic quotes for King Henry IV part 1?

Here is a good one that I have used. Mowat Duncan believes that “honour becomes a matter of genuine integrity, rather than conformity to any external expectations.”
Others I have come across:
McGuire refers to the play extempore as "a discovery of self through pretence."
Hugh Dickinson- "detraction not only works against Hal in the play, it goes beyond the world of the play, into its literary history." Hope this helps

[angewina_naguen]

Hey just wondering if you have any critic quotes for King Henry IV part 1?

Hey, Abbylily!

Welcome to the forums! To add to dani01's excellent suggestions, I've got a few more critic quotes below. Huge credits to co-moderator for English Advanced Olivia for sourcing these amazing ones 

William Shakespeare's King Henry IV Part 1
Larry S. Champion, 1978
"[Shakespeare] seemed to realise that effective drama depends upon at least minimal emotional interaction between character and audience."

David Boyd, 1980
"Henry IV Part 1 is a celebration of the sheer plenitude, the multiplicity, of human life.”

Paul Dean, 2012
"Part of the reason why 1 Henry IV is generally agreed to be Shakespeare‘s masterpiece in the mode of the history play is its exploration of faction or counterfactuals, which, like drama itself, originate in the question “What if…?‘ There may be more than one kind of truth, and any one kind may be multifaceted.”

Hope this helps 

Angelina 

[stellaktenas]

Some more Henry IV Critics
- Edmondson in his paper “Temperament and Leadership in Henry IV” (2015) : “Hotspur, though more apparently mature, is temperamentally unsuited for leadership"
- Dean in his paper “Shakespeare’s True Counterfeit” where he explains how “Henry‘s right to the crown depends on his ability to maintain it.. Hence the image of kingship embodied by Henry is called into question, its value debased.”
- John Dryden “a lyar, a coward and a glutton” [On Falstaff]
- Boyd affirms the skill of the metatheatrical mode as “Shakespeare creates a political world in which success depends on the ability to play theatrical roles...”   

[AiramPevensie]

Thanks so much! This is a great resource, especially since Ishiguro (the one my school's doing) is a less well-known author.