Posted: September 13th, 2017

Wide Sargasso Sea

Paper, Order, or Assignment Requirements

Your final paper for this course is a research paper. You must reference credible scholarship in your work in order to achieve a decent grade. Remember that personal webpages, or things like Goodreads, does not constitute actual scholarship. You are free to reference the articles discussed in class in order to meet the research obligation of this assignment. If you are unclear about the works you are using and their applicability to this assignment, please consult me. Also remember that the absolute final date on which I can accept this paper is the last day of term.

You are free to write on a topic of your own devising, or you can write on one of the topics provided below.

Generally speaking, mythology is juxtaposed against history in our understanding of Western cultures and their relationships to the past. Myth is fabled, fantastic, and more or less “untrue,” while history is documented, factual, and, even while open to interpretation, generally regarded as containing some element of truth to it. Discuss the use of myth in O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds. What is O’Brien saying about the relationship between nationalism, history, mythology, and literature in the novel?

In Wide Sargasso Sea, Jean Rhys depicts her female characters as fundamentally disempowered in the face of conventional marriage and the codes that write themselves into this institution. Researching contemporary feminist or gender theory, discuss how Rhys’ critique of marriage works within or against the other forms of political critique that we see in the novel.

In Disgrace, Coetzee shows us, in David Lurie, a character who emerges from a highly structured and hierarchical setting where he knows “his place” into an amorphous, unstructured social setting where nobody necessarily seems to have “a place.” What is Coetzee ultimately saying about how we define ourselves as people, and how does this work with or against the critique of empire we find in these novels.

Research the figure of the Weetigo or the trickster, or both, in Cree (or, more broadly, native) culture and discuss the central role that either or both plays in the wider social and cultural themes that Highway explores in Kiss of the Fur Queen.

Discuss the representation of violence in Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen. What role does violence play in the novel? You should research the debates that continue to dominate postcolonial theory on the issue of colonial and anticolonial violence.
Antoinette’s story begins when she is a young girl in early nineteenth- century Jamaica. The white daughter of ex-slave owners, she lives on a run-down plantation called Coulibri Estate. Five years have passed since her father, Mr. Cosway, reportedly drunk himself to death, his finances in ruins after the passage of the Emancipation Act of 1833, which freed black slaves and led to the demise of many white slave owners. Throughout Antoinette’s childhood, hostility flares between the crumbling white aristocracy and the impoverished servants they employ.