ENG110Y: Narrative
Instructor: Ann-Barbara Graff
Office: Room 291
Office Hours: MWF 11:00 a.m. - 12:00 p.m.
Class Meeting Times: MWF 9:00 - 10:00 a.m.
Final Essay Topics
Choose one topic from the following list:
1. Sometimes fictional narratives refer to actual events, historical figures or real places. Write a consideration of the effect of mingling fact and fiction. Focus your discussion on two of Memoir of a Geisha, The Return of Martin Guerre, Citizen Kane, or Dora.
2. Biography is the uncritical, indiscriminate, unselective plotting and pegging of chronological details along the continuum of the subject's life. Agree or disagree with the premise, relying on one of more of the following authors and the material we have read to date: Gertrude Stein, Matthew Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, Arthur Golden, Natalie Zemon Davis, Sigmund Freud.
3. Analyze the means by which Faulkner achieves (or attempts to achieve) narrative unity in If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem: The Wild Palms.
4. From the perspective of a narrative scholar, compare Lord of the Flies (Brooks) and John Dollar (Wiggins), two renditions of the same story in two different media.
5. Like mood or tone, atmosphere may refer to the feeling that envelops all or part of a story, making it seem entirely, or by degrees, brooding, sinister, giddy, sad, or hilarious. However, atmosphere seems to be less a product of the laying on of descriptive detail (for example, Braddon's dark, gloomy manor, cellars and pathways, with their sense of confusion and disorder; or Gilman's lonely, and isolated backdrop against which a pyschodrama is acted out) than the product of something less easily described. Discuss how atmosphere is created in one of Faulkner, Wiggins, Welles, or Chopin.
This assignment is worth 15 % of your total grade. The essay must not be more than 2000 words (8 pages, typed, double-spaced) and should be handed in on or before Monday April 3, 2000.
Penalties for lateness: Extensions should not be asked for and will not be granted EXCEPT in cases of serious emergencies, e.g., medical crisis. Late essay will be penalized 5% per day (including weekends and holidays).
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Posted 4 October 1999