Final Prompts

The picture above is from www.treehugger.com, an environmental information site, and specifically from a story about climate change's impact on animals.


Below are the prompts for the take home part of the midterm.  Choose only one prompt, and be sure to include at least one quote from each of our readings that you discuss.  The essay will be due on Wednesday, May 13.

1.  How does the presence of works NOT originally written in English (Candide, Raise the Red Lantern, The Coyote Tales, Mother Courage, A Doll's House, "Donkey Skin," "All Kinds of Fur") affect your definition of world literature?  Which works are you comfortable reading?  Which works are you uncomfortable reading?  Why?  How comfortable should you be in a course like EN 202? Consider the impact of translation, genre, and readers' expectations here.

2.  How does the presence of works from African-American or Native American traditions (the slave narratives, the Coyote tales, Gerald Vizenor's stories, poems) affect your understanding of world literature?  Consider the impact of history, race relations, and readers' expectations.  Consider the impact that reading a more "mainstream" work of American literature might have in a world literature class like ours would have.  Or have the slave narratives entered the mainstream of American literature?

3.  Should professors continue to assign plays that are not available on film or are not being performed locally?   Why?  Why not?  Consider how planning for a performance of A Doll’s House or watching the DVD of this play may have helped you understand Nora’s situation better.  Do you think that watching a performance of Mother Courage helped you understand this play better?  Or should professors of literature not worry about what others choose to stage or film? After all, these professors are not professors of theater!  Feel free to discuss other plays that you’ve seen or to look at blog entries on The Love Suicides, Shintoku-Maru, Current Nobody, Southside, Tartuffe, Gem of the Ocean, and Waiting for Godot.  Also, be sure to read this essay from the City Paper: 
http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/display.php?id=34341


4.  Discuss folk tales as a genre of literature.  Given your definition of literature, how are these stories literature?  How are they NOT literature?  Discuss the part these stories play in world literature.  Consider that folk tales are often considered to be children's literature.  Should that make a difference?  Consider the role that orality, our beliefs about multiculturalism, and folk tales' local specificity each play.

By the way, here are links to some "local" Coyote stories.  The first is "Coyote's Adventures in Idaho":

http://www.ilhawaii.net/~stony/lore86.html

Next is the Cheyenne story, "Yellowstone Valley and the Great Flood":

http://www.ilhawaii.net/~stony/lore29.html

Finally, there is the Flathead story, "Coyote and the Monsters of the Bitterroot Valley":

http://www.ilhawaii.net/~stony/lore78.html


5.  Discuss at least two poems that we have discussed in class *and* two poems that we have read but not discussed in class.  How do these poems fit into your ideas about poetry, Romantic poetry, modern poetry, or world literature?  How do these poems complicate your ideas?  Explain why.  Consider how each poem sounds as well as how it reads.  Consider the imagery it contains as well as the literary context it fits into.  Feel free to discuss poems in translation as well as English-language poems.