Final Essays
Due Friday, April 25, 2003
These essays should be a minimum of 5 full pages long and should be no longer than 7 pages.
Works Cited: You should follow MLA format for essays, and should cite at least 5 important sources in your essay. You must photocopy these sources and include them in your Works Cited page (see a Handbook with MLA citing for info on how to do this; turn in your photocopies with the final essay in your manilla folder). These sources must not be from the internet; they must come from the library. If you use a book, only photocopy the pages you actually quote from. Note: Including a work in your Works Cited page means that you have cited it in your essay. In other words, you must quote from it or use its ideas. Be careful about citations. Any idea or words you get from a source must be given proper credit. ASK ME if you have any questions about this.
Make sure that your essay makes an argument, which means it lays out a clear thesis near the beginning and then proves that thesis.
Choose one prompt and run with it! If you can’t get a source off of the Reserve List, come see me. I can get let you borrow it and photocopy it.
If you wrote on a particular novel for your Reading Responses, you must not write on the same topic. Go in a different direction altogether. I prefer that you write on a different novel, but as long as the topic is nothing like what you wrote on for your Reading Response, that should be fine.
A. Read Sumit Sarkar’s “’Middle-class’ Consciousness and Patriotic Literature in South Asia” (ON RESERVE: A Companion to Postcolonial Studies. Eds. Henry Scwarz and Sangeeta Ray, Malden, Mass: Blackwell, 2000, 252-268.) and write an essay that relates any of its ideas to Tagore’s The Home and the World and/or Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Be careful about being too broad. Choose one topic and use that to spark a way to discuss the novel(s).
B. Read Chinua Achebe’s “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness” (ON RESERVE: Postcolonial Criticism. Eds. Bart Moore-Gilbert, et al, New York: Longman, 1997, 112-125.) and write an essay that examines racism in Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines and Conrad’s “An Outpost of Progress.” Discuss Achebe’s reaction to Heart of Darkness and make an argument about whether his judgment would be viable for Haggard and the other Conrad story.
C. Read Mahfouz’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech (Dictionary of Literary Biography, Yearbook 1988. 12-14. Look in the 3rd floor stacks under PN451.D53 ). Explicate his major claims there. How do the ideas he presents in his speech relate to Midaq Alley? Especially look at his statement that he is a child of “two civilizations” (12) and then “drank the nectar of your rich and fascinating culture” (13, italics mine).
D. Read the text that is all around us, the war against Iraq. How can this effort be seen as imperialistic or non-imperialistic? You must have at least five credible sources from credible magazines. Pay attention as to whether any source contains a bias, and try to remain objective in your analysis. Look up credible definitions of imperialism and then really examine our movement in Iraq. This is not a cop-out essay, and I expect a real examination of the issues for this one.