of Department English and Comparative Literary Studies
Modes of Reading 2007-2008 First Assessed Essay Due 3 pm Monday, Jan 21st 2008 (Term 2 Week 3)
Two copies of the essay should be handed in to the English Department office by the deadline. Penalty will be incurred for late submission. Any request for extensions should be made in advance to the First Year Director of Undergraduate Studies and should normally be accompanied by a medical certificate. Extensions are granted only in very severe and exceptional circumstances. Before beginning work on the essay, please refer to guidelines for submission in the Undergraduate Handbook, available at: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/undergraduate/current/ug_handbook_0708.pdf (pp. 26 ff).
Write an essay of approximately 3,500 words on one of the following topics (further titles may be provided by seminar tutors):
(Remember: You should not discuss texts studied for Literature and the Modern World, nor should you repeat material from your un-assessed work.)
1.
F.L. Lucas had commented on Leavis' ideas on education in the university as being "narrow, insular and the very reverse of life enhancing". Do you agree? If you were to devise your own syllabus for Modes of Reading, what 4 themes would you choose, and what kinds of texts would you assign? Discuss at least one key text (literary, non-fiction or theoretical) per unit. Also give ideas for at least a couple of assignments you would design to circumvent Lucas's criticism of Leavis.
2. Explore how the nation (e.g. England but not exclusively so) is "imagined" in the work of one or two of the authors and theorists studied this term? You may wish to consider the manner in which they read national landscapes, language/ s, culture/s and economics through their engagement with literature or literary studies. 3. `What we have lost is the organic community with the living culture it embodied' (Culture and Environment). Compare and contrast the ideas of `community' found in the essays of F.R. Leavis and Raymond Williams. 4. MacInnes claimed in a 1959 book review that "we" know little "workingclass of child mothers, ageing semi-professional whores, the authentic agonies of homosexual love, and the new race of English born coloured boys....the millions of teenagers...the Teds...the multitudinous
Commonwealth minorities in our midst". How are ideas of people living in 'sub-cultural' realities and spaces represented in Absolute Beginners? 5. "The appropriation of history, the historicization of the past, the narrativization of society, all of which give the novel its force, include the accumulation and differentiation of social space, space to be used for social purposes" (emphasis added; Said, Culture and Imperialism, 93). Discuss the representation of space and place in Colin MacInnes's Absolute Beginners. 6. "As we look back at the cultural archive, we begin to reread it not univocally but contrapuntally"(Said, Culture and Imperialism). What is `contrapuntal' reading? Use your engagement with Colin MacInnes' Absolute Beginners to show how we can read it contrapuntally. 7. The Good Woman of Szechwan is a work concerned, in part, with power and the construction of public identity. Making particular reference to themes of gender, class and wealth, discuss the ways in which Brecht interrogates the relationship between ...