EN 251 New Literatures in English
Assessed Essay 1 (2,500 words)
Submission: Tuesday 12.00, Term 2, Week 2
(ERASMUS students should follow their own deadlines)
Please consult the Department website for guidance on essay submission and
citations:
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/undergraduate/essay
You should make detailed reference to at least two of the set texts you have read
in Term 1. 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. “If you want to know the facts of the retreat from Moscow in 1815, you may
read a history book; if you want to know what war is like, and how people of a
certain time and background dealt with it as their personal situation, you must
read War and Peace.” (Nadine Gordimer, The Black Interpreters). Write on
the relationship between fiction and history in the texts you have read this
term for this module.
2. There is no political power without control of the archive, if not of memory.
Jacques Derrida (1996). How are memory, archive and power related?
3. “I could’ve written another magic-realist novel, but this novel demanded a
way of writing which is very different for me: to contain my imagination, to
constrict and constrain it the whole time.” (Achmat Dangor). Write on South
African authors’ and film-maker’s quest for the appropriate style for their
subjects.
4. “Man, in this New South Africa we can play at anything, mix’ n match, talk
and sing anyway we like. Because of freedom, he explains.” (Playing in the
Light) Comment on how freedom and identity are bound to one another.
5. “The subjective conditions for affirmative Bildung have come into existence
by the end of the novel, but they are rendered null and void by the objective
conditions of the apartheid state” (Rita Barnard). What is the relationship
between individuals and the state in the ‘new’ South Africa.
6. “Forget the past. Don’t only forgive it. Forget it as well. The past did not
happen. You only dreamt it. It is a figment of your rich collective imagination.
It did not happen. Banish your memory. It is a sin to have a memory. There is
a virtue in amnesia. The past. It did not happen. It did not happen. It did not
happen.” (Heart of Redness). Discuss the interaction between the past and the
present in the texts you have studied this term.
7. Analyse the relationship between race, class, and space in the ‘new’ South
African literature.
8. “The specter of ‘crime’ is, indeed, the joker in the pack for South Africa’s
negotiated revolution, creating as it does uncomfortable copulas with the
apartheid past, both in everyday life and in the realm that more immediately
concerns us, namely the felt imaginaries discernible in ‘transitional’ or ‘posttransitional’ writing” (Leon de Kock). Why is crime a crucial element in the
‘new’ South African texts?
9. “As the defeat of apartheid became a reality, more serious attention was given
to the relationship between women’s and national liberation. In spite of
increasing emphasis on gender issues, however, South African literary
criticism has generally overlooked the ways in which rape stories have
functioned within the discourse of race, and has neglected to consider the
relationship between representations of political and sexual violence” (Lucy
Graham). Discuss the relationship between gender, power, and violence
10. Cultural identities are “the unstable points of identification or suture ... within
the discourses of history and culture. Not an essence but a positioning. Hence,
there is always a politics of identity, a politics of position” (Stuart Hall, qtd. in
J. U. Jacobs). Write an essay exploring the politics of cultural identity in the
‘new’ South Africa.