Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies
EN265 The Global Novel
Assessed Essay Topics
Term Two
One hard copy of the essay should be handed in to the English Department
office not later than 12 noon on Wednesday 23 April 2014.
The following topics are suggestions. You may modify them, or devise one of
your own, but should do so only in consultation with your seminar tutor.
While you may range as widely as you like in world fiction, not
necessarily confining yourself to books studied on the module, you should
make detailed reference to at least two of the set texts. * Material used in the
essay must not be substantially repeated in the examination.
* Unless you decide to do question 11.
1. ‘Disaster is everywhere and touches everything.’(Eric Cazdyn) What can we
learn about the ‘global’ condition from disaster events?
2.‘Cultures form through the process of adaption to distinct environments.
“Cultures of disaster” form when frequently occurring natural disasters are
integrated into the schema of daily life.’ (Mark Anderson) How might the texts
you have read this term be understood as parts of the ‘culture of disaster’?
3. ‘By slow violence I mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a
violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an
attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all.’ (Rob Nixon)
How do ‘global’ texts help us visualize ‘slow violence’?
4. ‘What I wish to stress here, then, are not just those communities that are
involuntarily (and often militarily) relocated to less hospitable environs, but also
those affected by what I call displacement without moving.’ (Rob Nixon)
Analyse some examples of individuals or communities who are ‘displaced
without moving’ in the texts you have read.
5. “You can’t change the blood in your veins. It will cry out in the darkness of
night against your foolishness. I told you before to love this Irish earth as your
mother. How? Ask the people. (Famine). How do disaster narratives
represent communities and collectivities?
6.‘Paranoia about nature, of course, distracts attention from the obvious fact
that Los Angeles has deliberately put itself in harm’s way’. (Mike Davis)
Examine the relationship between urban spaces and disasters in the global
narratives you have studied.
7. ‘Thus do the Mundas and low castes of Chotti village enter the national
economic pattern of independent India. The state has left no spot for them in
this pattern [….] But even the excluded must live.’ (Chotti Munda) How and to
what effect do disaster narratives tell the story of the State?
8.’Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to
imagine the end of capitalism. We can now revise that and witness the attempt
to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world’. (Fredric
Jameson) How can narratives of apocalyptic disaster help us understand the
global system?
9.‘It causes a jolt of terror to run through him, this absence of official time’
(Oryx and Crake). Write an essay on the representation of time in the disaster
narratives you have read.
10.’Watch out for art […] As soon as they start doing art, we’re in trouble’.
(Oryx and Crake). What is the relationship between art and global disasters?
11. Make a case for the inclusion of a novel you have read that is not on the
syllabus. Your essay must refer to at least one set text by way of comparison
and fit the rubric of term one.
12. How do non-fictional narratives incorporate novelistic strategies to
represent disasters?
13. ‘Why do I have to be the fucking ghost?’ (Wave) How are loss and grief
represented in disaster narratives?