Critical reading for Critical reading for ComprehensionComprehension

Critical Over View of the TextTo look at the text from a

distance

Questioning the AuthorQuestioning the Author

•What is the author's purpose?•What is the author doing in this paragraph?•Why did the author put this information here?•What is being compared/contrasted here?•What alternatives does the author offer?•What is the author implying?•What is the author not telling you?•What is the author's tone?

Apply the Questions: text Apply the Questions: text 11 The new religion of Christ and the translation of its

Scriptures into the other languages of the followers, helped to promote the tradition of writing literature. European scholars started knowing the basics of so many other languages along with their own native languages during Middle Ages. This access to several languages set scholars to thinking about how languages might be compared. Encyclopedia (1995) in this connection gives us the information that the revival of classical learning in the Renaissance laid the foundation for a misguided attempt by grammarians to fit all languages into the structure of Greek and Latin. More positively, medieval Christianity and Renaissance learning led to 16th- and 17th-century surveys of all the then-known languages in an attempt to determine which language might be the oldest. On the basis of the Bible, Hebrew was frequently so designated. Other languages—Dutch, for example—were also chosen because of accidental circumstances rather than linguistic facts.

Text 2Text 2 Shakespeare Through the Ages presents not the

most current of Shakespeare criticism, but the best of Shakespeare criticism, from the seventeenth century to today. In the process, each volume also charts the flow over time of critical discussion of a particular play. Other useful and fascinating collections of historical Shakespearean criticism exist, but no collection that we know of contains such a range of commentary on each of Shakespeare’s greatest plays and at the same time emphasizes the greatest critics in our literary tradition: from John Dryden in the seventeenth century, to Samuel Johnson in the eighteenth century, to William Hazlitt and Samuel Coleridge in the nineteenth century, to A.C. Bradley and William Empson in the twentieth century, to the most perceptive critics of our own day. This canon of Shakespearean criticism emphasizes aesthetic rather than political or social analysis.