Outline of major assignments, and assignment percentages

Essay 1:

Close/Critical reading Assignment (6 pages):

From Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure and selections from Raymond Williams’ Country and the City and “Wessex and the Border”, answer these questions:

1. Examine the passages you have selected from your close-reading of the novel. Are there any resonances between your reflections and Raymond Williams’ reading of Thomas Hardy?
2. What is the characterization of the rural and urban in the novel?
3.  What is the nature of characters’ vocations in the novel, in other words, what kind of “labour” do they perform in the spaces they inhabit? How does this affect their interpersonal relationships?
4. Examine instances of alienation and togetherness experienced by the characters. How does this relate to changes occurring in their community and society as a whole?

Essay 2:

Text in Context Assignment (7 pages)

From Dickens’ Hard Times write an essay with a thesis statement that pertains to one or more of the following themes:

1. How do factory conditions produce the “humans” in the novel? What does it do to their feelings, desires, needs and imaginations?
2. What are the ideas that Gradgrind subjects his children to? How and why does it shape the manner in which they rebel?
3. What in your opinion constitutes the “realism” in the novel? For example, is it maximal, symbolic or a combination of the two?
4. What, in your opinion, is the significance of the ending of the novel?

Essay 3:

Lens Essay Assignment (15 pages)

Compare both Middlemarch and Doctor Thorne by close-reading them. Based on what these yields, come up with a thesis statement that deals with their contrasting treatment of specific critical/political issues (for example, feminism/gender/sexuality, labour and political solidarities, migration and its psychological effects) and their relation to space and topography. Go to your library OneSearch and find critical essays (literary or theoretical) that are most relevant to your thesis question. Use the arguments contained within them to write your essay. You may disagree with/clarify the ideas presented in the secondary texts.

(or)

 Choose either Middlemarch or Doctor Thorne as your primary texts and either Paul Ricoeur’s “Time and Narrative: Threefold Mimesis” in Time and Narrative or Bakhtin’s “The Forms of Time and of the Chronotope of the Novel in the Dialogic Imagination as your secondary texts. Using the secondary texts as a theoretical lens, write about the primary text. You can disagree with/clarify the ideas presented in the secondary texts.