Guidelines for Lit 13 2nd long literary essay
1st semester, SY 2014-2015
General instructions
Choose only one option. Indicate your choice clearly in your essay. Your work will be
marked according to the clarity and force of your argument, substantiation, organisation,
lucidity of language, and depth of insight. Follow the format indicated in the syllabus. Word
count: min. 1,250; max. 1,500.
Deadline: Friday, 17th October 2014, 12:00 p.m. (mailbox). You may discuss your
outline and drafts with me; final day for consultation is Wednesday, 15th October 2014,
12.00 p.m.; no consultations will be entertained after that.
Option A
According to Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin (in the excerpt from The Dialogic
Imagination; see reading packet), one of the main characteristics of a novel is
“heteroglossia.” This “multiplicity of social voices and a wide variety of their links and
interrelationships” is made possible by the entry into the novel of devices like “authorial
speech, the speeches of narrators, inserted genres,” among a host of other elements. This
multiplicity of styles and genres—“social diversity of speech types and . . . differing
individual voices that that flourish” in the novel, the unfolding of the “theme through
different languages and speech types,” the dispersion into the rivulets and droplets of social
heteroglossia“—is, for Bakhtin, the basic distinguishing feature of the stylistics of the novel.
In your essay:
(1) Discuss the notion of heteroglossia;
(2) Identify and discuss at least two styles and genres in The Unbearable Lightness of
Being;
(3) Identify and read closely at least four passages that illustrate the style and/or genre
indicated in question no. 2
(4) Demonstrate why Kundera chooses the formal category of heteroglossia to
conduct an “investigation of human life in the trap the [contemporary] world has
become.”
Option B
The Cuban novelist and critic Alejo Carpentier, in his essay “Baroque and the
Marvelous Real” (see reading packet) characterises the baroque in terms of its energy and its
relation to empty space. The baroque has an “expansive energy”—“outward” and
“centrifugal”—that makes various elements “completely fill the space of the construction.”
Similarly, for him, the marvelous is “everything that eludes established norms”—a category
that can include even “ugliness, deformity, all that is terrible.” In your essay:
(1) Discuss the notions of baroque and marvelous;
(2) Identify and read closely at four passages from Blindness that illustrate your
discussion (two for baroque, two for marvelous); and
(3) Demonstrate why Saramago chooses the formal categories of baroque and
marvelous to write a novel about the contemporary moment: “thousands of
millions in an uprooted, exhausted world” that needs “organising.”