Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies
EN265 The Global Novel
Assessed Essay Topics
Term One (2015-16)
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 7.
1. Violence, above all environmental violence, needs to be seen – and deeply considered – as a
contest not only over space, or bodies, or labor, or resources, but also over time [….] In the
long arc between the emergence of slow violence and its delayed effects, both the causes and
the memory of catastrophe readily fade from view as the casualties incurred typically pass
untallied and unremembered. [Rob Nixon] Write an essay on the relationship between time
and violence in global narratives.
2. “Disaster” is what we usually say when we mean “crisis,” and “crisis” is what we usually say
when we really want – or do not want – to say “revolution,” or at the least, “radical change.”
(Eric Cazdyn, ‘Disaster, Crises, Revolution). What are the various kinds of crises we encounter
in global narratives?
3. “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 ‘global’ narratives represent the ‘nation’ and the ‘people’?
4. “Your children are crying for you,” he said to her as she passed.
He could not hear his own voice and she could not have heard him speak, nor had she
recognised him, for she went past without looking at him, still raising her right hand above her
head and crying out repeatedly:
“Dead meat.” (Famine) How do disasters shape the most intimate individual relationships?
5.‘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.
6.’Watch out for art […] As soon as they start doing art, we’re in trouble’. (Oryx and Crake). What is
the relationship between art, globalisation and disasters?
7. Make a case for the inclusion of a novel you have read that is not on the syllabus.
8. Above this [this lowest tier], comes the favoured terrain of the market economy, with its many
horizontal communications between the different markets: here a degree of automatic
coordination usually links supply, demand and prices. Then alongside, or rather above this
layer, comes the zone of the anti-market, where the great predators roam and the law of jungle
operates. This – today as in the past, before and after the industrial revolution, is the real home
of capitalism. (Fernand Braudel, The Wheels of Commerce 1982). How are the ‘great predators’ of
the capitalist world portrayed in global narratives?
9. In the past decade ... [t] he dramatic climb of the Dow and the speed of the
Internet summoned us all to live permanently in the future, in the utopian
glow of cyber-capital, because there is no memory there and this is where
markets are uncontrolled and investment potential has no limit.
(Don DeLillo, "In the Ruins of the Future") Write on aspects of the future as imagined in some
of the novels you have read this term
10. The war, however, also blurred the rigid roles of women and men
whenever women replaced men: not only men but women too would
enlist in the army; women would take over production tasks and even
act as heads of household in the absence of a husband. (Helle Rydstrom). What are the effects of
global war on gender relations?