English 360L – FINAL ESSAY
Please choose one of the following prompts for your midterm essay; if you would like to write on another topic, please come and talk to me about it first. This essay should be a demonstration of literary analysis that engages with one of the main themes of this course. Papers should be in polished collegiate prose, MLA style, double-spaced, one-inch margins, in 11 or 12 point Times or Times New Roman ONLY. Final papers are due electronically to me (by email: snehal.shingavi@mail.utexas.edu) on May 7th.
- Choose any passage from Joyce, Soyinka, Tutuola, Narayan or Desani (no more than 2 pages in length). Using only material from those two pages, explain how the language of the novel helps bring out themes that we have been addressing in class. This is an exercise in closer reading. I want to see not only how well you understand the themes of the course but also how carefully you consider the literary techniques, style, tempo, and/or word choices to arrive at your conclusions. Make sure that you choose a passage that we haven’t covered in class to talk about for your paper.
- Compare Narayan and Joyce. In both books we have narrators and characters who are either suspicious of nationalism or critical of how nationalism erodes the individual. How are those critiques of nationalism represented? Are these legitimate critiques of nationalism or the outgrowth of what Ngugi calls “self-loathing” (the alienation that colonial education produces)?
- Compare Desani and Tutuola. In both novels we have wild stylistic experimentation (in Tutuola this is indigenous folk narrative; in Desani, we have high modernism). What is the function of their formal experimentation? What is the relationship between the formal experimentation and the processes of colonialism that are represented in the novels? Which novel do you think more consistently critiques colonization and why?
- Compare Soyinka and Gandhi. In both books (autobiography/memoirs) we have authors describing their own education and the development of their own nationalist politics. What difference does the adult voice in Gandhi’s Autobiography make in comparison with the child-like voice in Ake? How do autobiographies and memoirs narrate the problems of colonial education differently than the novels we have read? What can you tell about the audiences for whom these texts were written?
No comments:
Post a Comment