This is It! The Entry with the Midterm Prompts Is Now Up!!

  The picture above is of Senegalese singer/actor Youssou N'Dour who played author Olaudah Equiano in the 2007 movie Amazing Grace.

Below are the prompts.  I will be going over them in tomorrow's class.

1.  Discuss life writing as a genre of literature.  Given your definition of literature, how is lifewriting (not only autobiographies and memoirs but also biographies, letters, and diaries) literature?  How is it NOT literature?  Could life writing be a more personal form of history? Consider The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl as your main examples, but feel free to include other examples from your reading (The Diary of Anne Frank, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Black Elk Speaks, Into the Wild).


2.  Discuss film as a genre of literature.  Given your definition of literature, how is film literature?  How is it NOT literature?  If you were to teach a film and literature course, which films would you include?  Why?  In this type of course, is it more important for a film to be a groundbreaking film (like Citizen Kane or Apocalypse Now) or for a film to be based on an important work of literature (like Jane Eyre or A Doll's House)?  Why? 


3.  A number of our works so far this semester were originally written in English although not every author was a native English speaker.  How does the presence of these works affect your definition of world literature?  How does the presence of works NOT originally written in English (A Doll's House, So Long a Letter) change your definition of world literature?  Consider Chinua Achebe and Ngugi wa Thiongo's arguments about the language one writes in.  Keep in mind that our class' common language is English, but could some of us branch out in EN 202?  Take a look at the blog entries and see that A Doll's House was translated into English fairly quickly and has remained a staple of the Anglophone repertoire.  Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano were translated into other languages.  Does this mean that Joseph Conrad should have written in Polish and relied on translators for his English or French audience?

4.  Consider the novel as a genre.  What do the works we've read have in common?  Where do they differ?  How has the novel developed if we start with Oroonoko and move on from there to Heart of Darkness and So Long a Letter?  Consider other novels that you've read (novels by Jane Austen, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Albert Camus, or J.R.R. Tolkein) as well.  Feel free to discuss elements such as narration, point of view, the protagonist (who may be a protagonist, for example), plot, setting, character, and mimesis (attempt to depict reality or realism in art).  Have contemporary literary critics feminized the novel?!  

Good luck!