New Literatures in English (EN251): 2016-2017

First Assessed Essay Questions (2,500 words)

Due on17thJanuary 2017 (Tuesday, Week 2, Term 2)

Please consult the Department website for guidance on essay submission and citations:

(ERASMUS students should follow their own deadlines)

Answer ONE of the following questions.Feel free to formulate your own question in consultation with Neil Lazarus or Pablo Mukherjee.

  1. ‘[S]he saw how she loved him [Baba], loved Raja and Tara and all of them who had lived in this house with her. There could be no love more deep and full and wide than this one, she knew. No other love had started so far back in time and had had so much time in which to grow and spread… Although it was shadowy and dark, Bim could see as well as by the clear light of day that she felt only love and yearning for them all, and if there were hurts, these gashes and wounds in her side that bled, then it was only because her love was imperfect and did not encompass them thoroughly enough, and because it had flaws and inadequacies and did not extend to all equally’. What, in your opinion, are the grounds on which Bim is able to come to a certain peace with herself and her family in Desai’s Clear Light of Day?
  1. Is the state of condition of ‘disgrace’, as it is variously figured in J.M. Coetzee’s novel, haunted by a countervailing image of ‘grace’? Discuss, by way of exploring the question of ethics in Disgrace.
  1. Why, in your opinion, does Mustafa Sa’eed incite in the narrator of Season of Migration to the North such a deep-seated existential crisis? How does this crisis bear upon the novel’s central themes?
  1. What does ‘smallness’ signify in The God of Small Things, and why is it so important to Arundhati Roy?
  1. Discuss the representation of relationships between women in Half of a Yellow Sun.
  1. How is the relationship between humans and non-humans portrayed in The Hungry Tide?
  1. ‘For all of its progressive anti-apartheid energies, District 9 stands as a troubling

lament on behalf of South African whites for the world lost with the end of apartheid. Disturbingly, it literalizes the long-running nightmare of the white Afrikaner that the demise of apartheid spells the decline of the white ruling elite, who will be reduced to a condition identical to that of the continent’s impoverished, exploited, and politically oppressed black masses. Abandoned and alone, utterly without means to change his fate, Wikus is the lost member of his white tribe whose life consists of sifting through garbage in a slum, waiting, perhaps forever, for his transmundane saviour to return things to the way they were before the fall’ (Michael Valdez Moses).

Would you agree or disagree with this critical assessment of District 9? Give reasons for your answer.

  1. Compare the representations of the relationship between nature and culture in The God of Small Things and The Hungry Tide.
  1. ‘Hamid’s work of fiction replies directly and cleverly to George W. Bush’s question, “why do they hate us?” even while exploring the reverse (if asymmetrical) question, “why do we fear them?” In the process, the novel layers the complex, contradictory relationships to the US that the world bears: as a means to personal upward mobility, a center of global finance capital, a dangerous imperial power, an object of romantic attachment, and finally, an object of intelligible hatred… [C]ontemplatingThe Reluctant Fundamentalistas a worldly American novel leads to a substantive revision of both what we mean by “world” and what we mean by “American” in the context of post-9/11 literature (LeeromMedovoi, ‘Terminal Crisis?’).

Discuss.

  1. The ‘vengeance killings’ in District 9 are ‘directed not at the standard lawbreakers of Western or police drama, but at white men in positions of power and authority…. Thus the revenge climax alludes to the fundamental social issue of the distribution of the right to violence, in each case seizing it from the “evil” representatives of the fictional status quo and wielding it against them in the name of justice’ (John Reider). Can there ever be a ‘right to violence’? Discuss, with reference to District 9 and at least one other work studied in Term 1.
  1. ‘Yes, sah. It will be part of a big book. It will take me many more years to finish it and I will call it “Narratives of the Life of a Country”.’ (Half of a Yellow Sun) Discuss the importance of story-telling and/or writing in any two works studied in Term 1.
  1. ‘They were surprised when I told them that Europeans were, with minor differences, exactly like them’ (A Season of Migration to the North). How are Europe and/or America imagined in does postcolonial fiction imagined in any two of the following: Half of a Yellow Sun; Season of Migration to the North; The Reluctant Fundamentalist; The God of Small Things; The Hungry Tide?
  1. ‘Like Manhattan? Yes, precisely! And that was one of the reasons why for me moving to New York felt – so unexpectedly – like coming home’ (The Reluctant Fundamentalist). Write an essay on the importance of ‘home’ in any two of the following: Clear Light of Day; Half of a Yellow Sun; Season of Migration to the North; The Reluctant Fundamentalist; The Hungry Tide.
  1. ‘By what right are you here?’ (Disgrace) How does the question of ‘rights’ enter the ‘new literature’ narratives you have read? Answer with reference to any two works studied in Term 1.
  1. ‘Piya understood too that this was a looking-glass in which a man like Fokir could never be anything other than a figure glimpsed through a rear-view mirror, a rapidly diminishing presence, a ghost from a perpetual past that was Lusibari’ (The Hungry Tide). Write an essay on the idea of ‘perpetual past’ in any two works studied in Term 1.
  1. ‘Old Delhi does not change. It only decays’ (Clear Light of Day). Write an essay on the relationship between ‘change’ and ‘decay’ in any two works studied in Term 1.