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Overview

  • Comparative essay

  • Anlysing and engaging with scholarly research on TWO books 

    • James by Percival Everett

    • Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

    • The Hate Race by Maxine Beneba-Clarke

  • Close read and analyse scholarly research and literary texts

    • Criticism

    • reviews

    • commentary

    • theory

  • Upload evidence of your engagement with the research sources

  • MUST BE FORMATTED AS MLA 9TH

MORE DETAILS:

  • 1650 Words (WOOHOOOOO)

    • not including quotes

  • You may use and of the secondary sources suggested or set in the course

  • Must refer to at least THREE secondary sources.

  • Include one annotated page of each source

Questions:
1. “A sharing of interiority” is critical to getting lost in the world of the book, write
Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle: “We come to inhabit other minds and bodies
imaginatively, becoming other to ourselves” (This Thing Called Literature 44).
Analyse the ways in which your chosen texts create characters though dialogue and/or
narrative voice. Construct an argument about how these techniques provide a sense of
character, sometimes differentiating and sometimes blurring the boundaries between
self and other. Remember to consider genre (e.g. novel / life writing).


2. All three texts in weeks 6-9 feature intriguing child narrators and characters. Toni
Morrison reflects on books that appeal to child readers versus books that appeal to
academic critics:
Usually the divide is substantial: if a story that pleased us as novice readers
does not disintegrate as we grow older, it maintains its value only in its
retelling for other novices or to summon uncapturable pleasure as playback.
Also, the books that academic critics find consistently rewarding are works
only partially available to the minds of young readers. (“Introduction” 154)
Morrison argues that Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is an
exception to this truism. Analyse the ways in which your chosen texts construct the
image of the child. Construct an argument about how the perspective of the child
provides a distinctive voice or affects literary style, and thus how the reader responds
to children in these texts. Remember to consider genre (e.g. novel / life writing).


3. I thought of my grandparents, the lyrical poetic way they spoke
English, their voices singing down the phone receiver at me as
if each syllable was a pitch-perfect note, carefully selected from a
scale they alone were attuned to. Surely such beautiful language
could not be the result of such a horrible history. (Clarke 111)

Use Maxine Beneba Clark’s discussion from The Hate Race above to investigate how
language and history operate in your chosen texts. Analyse the ways in which your
chosen texts use language. Construct an argument about how language helps these
texts make meaning. Is history simply carried by language or does some language use
in your texts subvert history? Remember to consider genre (e.g. novel / life writing).

4. Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle argue that realist literary conventions are often
questioned by twenty-first-century writers:
Indeed, these notions of the conventionality of realism have a troubling
corollary: perhaps the sense of the ‘real’ that novels purport simply to present
is in fact a way of constructing reality for us. Perhaps it is, at least in part,
precisely by reading narratives such as novels that we invent for ourselves a
sense of what the ‘real’ world is like. (This Thing Called Literature 40).
Examine how realism functions in your chosen texts and notice when alternative
forms of representation interrupt or augment realist narratives. Are your authors
questioning what is “real” as opposed to what is constructed or performed in these
texts? What effects do their experiments with realism have on the texts’ meaning?
Remember to consider genre (e.g. novel / life writing).


5. In his “Nobel Lecture” (2017), Kazuo Ishiguro emphasizes the centrality of stories in
the contemporary world: “in the end, stories are about one person saying to another:
This is the way it feels to me. Can you understand what I’m saying? Does it also feel
this way to you?” (14). How do your chosen texts strive to communicate across
cultures, technological divides, and / or time periods? What kinds of narrative styles
are necessary to do so, and what do they suggest about contemporary reading and
writing? Remember to consider genre (e.g. novel / life writing).


6. Daniel O’Gorman and Robert Eaglestone argue that “it is not only critics, but also
authors themselves who have been striving to give definition to the era we currently
occupy” (“Introduction,” The Routledge Companion to Twenty-First Century Literary
Fiction, Routledge, 2019, p. 3). By researching critics of twenty-first century
literature, make an argument about what trends in contemporary literature we might
see emerging as evidenced by your chosen texts. You may find other chapters of the
Routledge Companion helpful in identifying critical trends (including Stephen J.
Burn’s chapter “Family”, Martin Paul Eve on “Sincerity”, or Anna Hartnell on “From
Civil Rights to #BLM”). Remember to consider genre (e.g. novel / life writing).