EN 251 New Literatures in English
Assessed Essay 2 (2, 500 words) 2015-16
(ERASMUS students should follow their own deadlines)
Please consult the Department website for guidance on essay submission and citations:
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/undergraduate/essay/
You should make detailed reference to at least two of the set texts you have read in Term 2. You are
not required to do secondary reading. An essay of this length requires sustained attention to the primary texts. Secondary readings may be used as touchstones or points to either substantiate your argument. If you are using secondary material, please use the MLA citation index.
1. Discuss the relationship between gender and education in the fiction you have read this term.
2. “Nostalgia was their crack cocaine, if you will, and my childhood was littered with the
consequences of their addiction” (Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist). Examine the
theme of nostalgia in some of the works you have studied this term.
3. “Old Delhi does not change. It only decays.” Write on the relationship between ‘change’
and ‘decay’ in postcolonial fiction.
4. Discuss the significance of sexual violence in the novels you have studied this term.
5. “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.” (Hungry Tide) Write an essay on
the idea of ‘perpetual past’.
6.“Private life is public business” (Coetzee, Disgrace). Write an essay exploring the relationship between the public and the private spheres in postcolonial literature.
7. “[In Season of Migration,] the framing of the narrator’s tale within the hieratic oral manner
of a hakawati, a public teller of tales in the Arab world (“It was, gentlemen, after a long absence … that I returned to my people”) and a popular mode, is joined with mimicry of a sophisticated literary technique, mu-arada (or mucdradah)” (Benita Parry, “Aspects of Peripheral Modernisms”). Discuss the meaning and significance of the combined use of multiple literary modes and styles in some of the novels you have read for this module.
8.”Yet the current crop of vengeance killings is not only insistently moralistic, at least in Avatar and District 9 but also is 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
by referring District 9 and at least one other text from your module.
9.“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’” (Adichie, Half of a Yellow Sun). Analyse the significance of writing and story-telling in any two or more of the texts you have studied this term.
10. Critically analyse the impact and significance of the narrative device of the unreliable nar-
rator in the texts you have studied this term.
11. “They were surprised when I told them that Europeans were, with minor differences, exactly like them.” (A Season of Migration to the North) How does postcolonial fiction imagine
the ‘West’?