EN 251 New Literatures in English
Assessed Essay 2 (2, 500 words)
(Due on Term 3 week 2, 29 April 2014, at 2 pm)
ERASMUS students should follow their own deadlines)
Note: Late essays will have 5 marks deducted per day the essay is late.
Please consult the Department website for guidance on essay submission
and citations:
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/undergraduate/ess
ay/
Your essays must be 1.5, with page numbers clearly marked and 2.5” margins
on each side. The pages should be properly stapled or the pages pinned
together. Please also read the Departmental regulations on Plagiarism in the
Students’ Handbook.
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 (a link is provided on the webpage cited above).
Answer any ONE of the following:
1.’The traumatized, we might say, carry an impossible history within them, or
they become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely
possess’. (Cathy Caruth) Show how fictional narratives are able to capture the
‘impossible history’ of trauma.
2. ‘Writing about the dilemmas of women caught between colonial and
patriarchal structures, novelists such as Anita Desai, Jamaica Kincaid, Tsistsi
Dangarembga and Buchi Emecheta have acknowledged the mixed blessings
of colonial education’. (Rajeswari Mohan) Discuss the relationship between
women and education in the fiction you have read this term.
3. ‘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 writing.
4. ‘I don’t know how you write about Nigeria without dealing with sex’.
(Chimamanda Adichie) Discuss how sexuality and erotics are represented in
the ‘new literatures’ of postcolonial societies.
5. ‘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’?
6. “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.
7.‘A novel that explored and dramatized the inner lives of characters caught
up in a historical development of underdevelopment’. (Ngugi Wa Thiongo on
Petals of Blood) How in ‘underdevelopment’ represented in the fiction you
have read this term.
8. ‘By what right are you here?” (Disgrace) How do the question of ‘rights’
enter the ‘new literature’ narratives?
9.’They dazzle me with the tonnage of cotton or coca that has been exported,
the acreage that has been planted with olive trees or grapevines. I am talking
about natural economies that have been disrupted’. (Aime Cesaire) Analyse
the representation of the environment in fiction.
10. ‘Little events, ordinary things, smashed and reconstituted. Suddenly, they
become the bleached bones of a story’. (The God of Small Things) Discuss
the importance of the ‘ordinary’ to the fiction you have read in this module.