EN2513
UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK
Summer Examinations 2015
New Literatures in English: Non-Finalists
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Time allowed:
Two hours.
Seen Examination
Answer TWO questions, ONE from Section A and ONE from Section B.
Read carefully the instructions on the answer book and make sure that the particulars
required are entered fully on each answer book used.
Do not substantially repeat material submitted for the assessed essays on the module.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Section A: Answer ONE question.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1. ‘[In The House Gun], Gordimer explores questions of individual and social responsibility
in the context of widespread violence. The central incident is a murder that seems to
have no obvious political (or even specifically South African) etiology or ramifications.
Nonetheless, Gordimer uses this enigmatic crime and its repercussions to probe
obliquely the complex relationship between the individual and the wider social context
in post-apartheid South Africa’ (David Medalie).
Discuss the relationship between the ‘personal’ and the ‘political’ in Gordimer’s novel.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------2. Bitter Fruit not only ‘constitutes an extended critical evaluation of the TRC process
through its personalized dramatization of the conflicts and confrontations that drove
the TRC’s work, [it also] presents a critique of uneven development in the post-apartheid
city. It maps the conflicts arising from the past onto the spaces of Johannesburg, in a
way that emphasizes the perpetuation of the malignities of apartheid, segregation, and
patriarchy through the structuring of space and the containment of mobility in
contemporary South Africa’ (Shane Graham).
Discuss the relationship between the ideological critique of ‘the TRC process’ and the
spatial critique of ‘uneven development’ in Dangor’s novel.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Continued
1
EN2513
3. Discuss the use of ordinariness or the everyday in the South African poetry you have
read.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------4. How does Zoë Wicomb use the character of Marion to explore the raced, classed, and
gendered dimensions of post-apartheid life in Playing in the Light?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------5. ‘[The] priest stands apart throughout Forgiveness, an enigma of stability, of stillness in a
film marked by transformation. His personality suffers only one change during the film,
in his shift from suspicion towards Coetzee’s true intentions, to moral approval of
Coetzee’s spiritual honesty. It is with the priest’s help that the film begins and it is on his
ground that it ends, with the characters gathered round a grave. As spectators, our
sympathies are thus most coherently aligned with those of the priest. We wonder at
Coetzee’s guilt, the depth of the moral depravity of his actions, but are gradually led to
understand that morality, guilt, and forgiveness are never simple things – that Coetzee’s
repentance somehow redeems him’ (Joshua McNamara).
Are the politics of Ian Gabriel’s film predicated on essentially religious conceptions of
‘forgiveness’ and ‘redemption’? Discuss.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------6. ‘When a house has been alarmed, it becomes explosive. It must be armed and disarmed
several times a day. When it is armed, by the touching of keys upon a pad, it emits a
whine that sends the occupants rushing out, banging the door behind them. There are
no leisurely departures: there is no time for second thoughts, for taking a scarf from the
hood behind the door, for checking that the answering machine is on, for a final look in
the mirror on the way through the hallway. There are no savoured home-comings
either: you do not unwind into such a house, kicking off your shoes, breathing the
familiar air. Every departure is precipitate, every arrival is a scraping-in’ (Vladislavic,
Portrait with Keys, p. 15).
Discuss the social and human implications of the ‘securitisation’ of everyday life in postapartheid South Africa as it is represented in Portrait with Keys.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------7. Is the 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.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Continued
2
EN251
8. ‘[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?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------9. ‘[W]hile Hamid’s novel undoubtedly identifies and critiques the racism at the heart of
the so-called war on terror – expressed both in domestic and foreign arenas – his text
also appears to be seduced by certain aspects of American exceptionalism. Though the
novel in part paints US imperial power as heir to the European colonial legacy, [it]… also
invests in the possibility that America might represent the transcendence of racial
differences’ (Anna Hartnell).
Discuss.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------10. ‘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.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------11. ‘All my life I had not chosen, had not decided. Now I am making a decision. I choose life.
I shall live because there are a few people I want to stay with for the longest possible
time and because I have duties to discharge. It is not my concern whether or not life has
meaning. If I am unable to forgive, then I shall try to forget. I shall live by force and
cunning. I moved my feet and arms, violently and with difficulty, until the upper part of
Continued
3
EN2513
my body was above water. Like a comic actor shouting on a stage, I screamed with all
my remaining strength, “Help! Help!”’
How do you understand these sentences which conclude Season of Migration to the
North, and how do you see them as bearing upon the novel as a whole?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Section B: Answer ONE question.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------12. Discuss the relationship between the social and the natural worlds in any two of the
following: Heart of Redness, Disgrace, Season of Migration to the North, The God of
Small Things, The Hungry Tide.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------13. Discuss the significance of the family home in Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day and
Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. You may want to focus on such topics as
inheritance, gender relations, history, and memory.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------14. Write an essay on narrative technique in any two of the works you have read this year.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------15. Discuss the presentation of globalisation as a social process in any two works you have
read this year.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------16. Discuss the relationship between the (limited) consciousness of individual characters in
The Hungry Tide and Half of a Yellow Sun and the wider social meanings developed by
the two texts.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------17. Is the category of the ‘post-colonial’ a relevant one in analysis of the work that you have
read this year? Discuss, with reference to any three works.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------End
4