ONE essay of 2,000 words chosen from the list of questions belowYou must answer on AT LEAST TWO novels studied on the module; Great Expectations, To the Lighthouse, Small Island and Never Let Me Go
The word count includes quotations, footnotes, endnotes and in-text references, but it does not include the bibliography/reference list. You will not be penalised as long as your assessment is within 10% of the word limit (over or under). QUESTIONS 1) ‘In any novel, the form in which its story is told is just as important as the content of the story itself’. In what ways do novels that you have studied on the module make use of different narrative styles in telling their stories and/or constructing characters? 2) ‘The realists’ commitment to the average and ordinary coexists … in some tension with their tacit assumption … that only the atypical can generate plot’ (Catherine Gallagher). In what ways do different novels that you have studied manage the tension between a desire to represent average, ordinary lives and the need to generate plot, suspense and character development? 3) ‘The received conventional plots [of the novel] – the propertied marriage and settlement; the intricacies of inheritance; the exotic adventure; the abstracted romance – are all, for obvious reasons, at a distance from working-class life’ (Raymond Williams). To what extent is the novel an essentially middle-class literary form? 4) ‘The novel is … the logical literary vehicle of a culture which, in the last few centuries, has set an unprecedented value on originality, on the novel’ (Ian Watt). What role does this ‘unprecedented’ significance accorded to modernity and innovation play in different novels that you have studied on the module? 5) In her study of ‘domestic fiction’, Nancy Armstrong notes that, ‘according to the middleclass ideal of love’, ‘the female relinquishes political control to the male in order to acquire exclusive authority over domestic life, emotions, taste, and morality’. To what extent is this manifested (or otherwise) in different novels that you have studied on the module? 1 6) According to Terry Eagleton, the novel ‘is less a genre than an anti-genre. It cannibalizes other literary modes and mixes the bits and pieces promiscuously together’. How is this manifested in different novels that you have studied on the module? 7) ‘Laughter is just as admissible in great literature … as seriousness’ (Mikhail Bakhtin). What are the functions of comedy and/or laughter in different novels that you have studied on the module? 8) What different kinds of truth claims are made by novels in their efforts to represent ‘reality’? 9) What is the relationship of the novel to ‘epic’ forms? 10) ‘A novel is both art and entertainment. If it bores even intelligent and patient readers it is not a novel; if it only entertains, it is not art’ (Agnes Heller). In light of this remark, what is the relationship between art and entertainment in the novel? 12) According to Ian Watt, the novel is the form of literature which most fully reflects the ‘individualist’ tendencies of modern culture. In what ways is this manifested (or not) in different novels that you have studied on the module? 13) ‘The form of the novel can only ever be fully understood in relation to the specific historical context from which it emerges’. How have different novels that you have studied on the module been shaped by their material conditions of production and/or reception?