How is your ability to identify with characters determined by values and beliefs as well as feelings?
LEVEL 6
ENG-20066
METHODS AND APPROACHES
ESSAY QUESTIONS 2021-22 (70%)
Write an essay on ONE of the questions given here. Your essay should take the form of an argument, with an introduction, a thesis sentence making it clear what you are going to argue (not just the kind of issues you will raise), a main body which builds up the argument step by step, one paragraph at a time, and a conclusion that rounds things off. It should demonstrate evidence of thorough secondary research, critical analysis, and independent thinking. For the purposes of this essay, unless otherwise specified, ONE text = 1 novel, film, or short story, or a minimum of 3 poems or fairy tales or essays.
For secondary criticism, please use books and articles from the library and/or found via Literature Online or the library catalogue or other reputable sites; do not use websites like SparkNotes. Make sure that all ideas taken from secondary criticism are clearly referenced, using bracket references with page numbers, and that you provide a bibliography of all works consulted. You will find guidance on essay presentation and on plagiarism in the English/EAL handbook on the KLE. Your essay should have numbered pages and should include a word-count. The essay should be 1,700 words in length (+/-10%). The word-count should include references and quotations, but not the bibliography and should appear at the end of your essay.
Please ensure when submitting your essay, you enter your student number in the ‘submission title’ drop box, as we will be unable to identify your work without it. If you have questions, please ask your seminar tutor.
Late submissions, without formally agreed extensions, will receive at most a bare pass mark of 40. Extensions must be applied for via e-Vision. Requests for extensions of 5 days or fewer will be automatically granted; requests for longer extensions will be considered and granted based on your explanation.
ESSAY QUESTIONS
Does it make more sense to read Waiting for Godot as comedy, or as tragedy, or is this a false opposition?
Examine the representation of labour in any one or two of the creative texts you have read for this module.
Does it make more sense to read Dr Faustus as tragedy, or as a morality play, or is this a false opposition?
Examine the representation of time and/or history and/or change and/ or death in any one or two creative texts on the module.
Use one of the theoretical texts you have read for this module to analyse how bodies and behaviours are shaped by, and/or resist, power in one or two of the creative texts on the module.
‘[C]arnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions’ (Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World 10). Discuss the treatment of carnival and/or the ‘carnivalesque’ in any one or two creative texts you have studied on this module.
Write an essay on the representation of cities and/or the countryside in any one or two creative texts on the module.
Eve Sedgwick claims that queer identities might best be understood by rejecting the binary homo- and hetero-sexual. To what degree do you think her opinion would be shared by any one or two writers whose works you have studied on this module?
To what degree does the genre of autofiction (autobiographical fiction) trouble notions of the stable and coherent self? Discuss with reference to any one or two texts on the module.
Discuss the ways in which any one or two of the creative texts covered on the module describe the individual experience of diaspora.
‘There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not lead single-issue lives’ (Audre Lorde, ‘Learning from the 60s’). How does an understanding of intersectionality enable you to better understand the experiences of individuals represented in any one or two creative texts on the module?
Compare the representation of interiority (or ‘character) in any two creative texts on the module.
Show how any one theoretical text you have read on the module illuminates your understanding of any one or two creative texts on the module.
‘Here he scraps with serpents and snarling wolves, / here he tangles with wodwos causing trouble in the crags, / or with bulls and bears and the odd wild boar’ (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, trans. Armitage, lines 720-22). Analyse human-nature and/or human-animal relationships in any one or two of the creative texts we have studied.
‘You’re tricked and trapped! But let’s make a truce, / Or I’ll bind you in your bed, and you’d better believe me’ (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, trans. Armitage, lines 1210-11). Investigate the relationship between language and action (e.g. seduction, compulsion, persuasion, insult) in two of the creative texts we have studied.
How is your ability to identify with characters determined by values and beliefs as well as feelings?
You may make up your own essay title, but if you choose to do this, you must agree the title with your tutor before the Easter vacation begins.
