Critical Review
In the wider academic world, review essays are commissioned by journals to “take the
temperature” of a discipline. A scholar is invited to review a handful of recent works and to
discuss emerging trends, theoretical debates, and new approaches that are changing the field.
Your task in this assignment is analogous, but slightly different. You can’t fall back on a deep
understanding of the discipline, so you won’t be able to assess the contribution of the review
pieces to a wider scholarship. Instead, you will focus on isolating core arguments from each
piece and making connections between them. Your analysis will integrate answers to the
following questions:
1)“What is the major argument, or thesis, of each assigned text?”; and
2) “Taken together, what do these texts contribute to a reader’s understanding of the topics
and themes they address?”
Try not to approach this as a summary, an opinion piece, a personal reflection, or a research essay
based on limited sources. A useful way to think about this is that your topic is the readings
themselves, not their shared topic.
And don’t be fooled by the words “critical review”–your task is neither to assess the merits of
the assigned readings nor to find something to criticize. Until you have read widely, you aren’t
in much of a position to do either, and you pretty much have to go on faith that the assigned
items have scholarly integrity and merit. Similarly, the fact that you are either persuaded or
confused by an essay or article, or that you liked or disliked it, isn’t really material and doesn’t
warrant comment; you are asked for a scholarly analysis, not a personal opinion.
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