Final paper for regular students

Having finished classes and exams, you are now ready to write your final paper(s). Below you'll find a list of suggested topics.
Support your views making reference to the texts. If you consult and quote secondary sources, that shouldn't be more than 20% of the paper, and in all cases, whether the quotations are literal or not, you MUST acknowledge the sources. Otherwise, the paper will not be accepted, and there won't be a chance for a make-up.

John Osborne and the Angry Young Men

Plays are literary texts, but they are also acting styles, props, lights, and a whole world of impressions that extend over the realm of words. That is why you can enrich your reading experience of Look Back in Anger by watching the film. There are two suggested versions you may watch: a 1959, older one; and another from the 1980s: You may find both in YOUTUBE.

James Joyce and his fellow Dubliners

James Joyce is counted among the most renowned Irish writers. His fiction includes Stephen Hero, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Dubliners, Ulysses, and Finnegan's Wake. Throughout these books, he explores the city of Dublin and its inhabitants, especially their inner side. This concentration on his characters' minds, thoughts, feelings, etc, eventually led Joyce to be one of the best exponents of the so-called stream-of-consciousness technique.

J. M. Coetzee. The Empire and Beyond

J. M. Coetzee is South African. Strictly speaking, what he writes is not British, or English, literature. Yet, it is literature written in English. This leads us to consider the most recent trend that speaks of "English Literatures", that is, those which use the English language as a means of expression, beyond national boundaries or ethnic origins.

In 2003, Coetzee was awarded the Nobel prize for literature. His writing deals with the topic of man's dominion over man. In portraying this, Coetzee is able to transcend specific refrences and achieve a deep understanding of human nature, in its most basic, luminous, and obscure sides alike.

This paradoxical, complex quality of human nature is clearly depiected in Waiting for the Barbarians, a novel which takes its title form a very well-known poem by Greek poet Konstantin Kavafi (1864-1933). Read the poem below and try to think of possible connections with the issue discussed in the chapter we have read from the novel by Coetzee.


Waiting for the Barbarians
By Constantine Cavafy (1864-1933), translated by Edmund Keeley


What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

The barbarians are due here today.

Why isn't anything happening in the senate?
Why do the senators sit there without legislating?

Because the barbarians are coming today.
What laws can the senators make now?
Once the barbarians are here, they'll do the legislating.

Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting at the city's main gate
on his throne, in state, wearing the crown?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor is waiting to receive their leader.
He has even prepared a scroll to give him,
replete with titles, with imposing names.

Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
and rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?

Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.

Why don't our distinguished orators come forward as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?

Because the barbarians are coming today
and they're bored by rhetoric and public speaking.

Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?
(How serious people's faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home so lost in thought?

Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
And some who have just returned from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.

And now, what's going to happen to us without barbarians?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.
(http://www9.georgetown.edu/faculty/jod/texts/cavafy.html)


Coetzee's novel can be analyzed using the tools provided by the Post-Colonial theory; and it can also be read as an example of border narratives. This theoretical approach has been clearly explained by Professor Gustavo Fares, whose views are expressed in the article “Border Studies' Positionality”. In: Nueva Revista de Lenguas Extranjeras; Facultad de Filosofía y Letras UNCuyo; n 13, 2010: 19-35
* What is a border? “A line that indicates a boundary.”
* Borders can be physical, or imagined (in the sense of being ideas manifested in physical facts as barriers, police patrols, walls, etc.)
* Borders are a nation's territorial limits, while borders are “paradoxically different in location and similar in complexity and diversity, always signaling encounters and interactions between and among the areas they mark.” (21)
* “Border thinking and formations are not in any way the result of 'natural' processes, but of social and political ones and, as such, have histories which are always subject to a variety of interpretations.
* In some of the interpretations, the role of borders is dual and, oftentimes, contradictory: boundaries are there to exclude as well as to allow passing, to segregate, but also to place people beside another.
* Proximity breeds interaction, which in turn produces an hybrid or 'enriched' culture... (21)

In analyzing Waiting for the Barbarians, we will bear in mind some of the concepts below:
* Border
* Difference
* The Other
* Identity
* Language

* Voice – voiceless –
silence – language –
power
* Interaction
* Colonialism
* Imposed borders

Kavafy, Coetzee, the Barbarians: past and present

Waiting for the Barbarians is a title that has resonances from the past: the Barbarians were "the outsiders", those who dod not speak the "civilized" language (Greek at first, Latin later on). To the "civilized" ear, their "foreign" language sounded like "bar bar bar", thus the name Barbarians. Barbarians, who are different from "us", may provoke feelings of fear for the unknown. Of course, this fear of what is different is not "civilized". Writers have tried to express the way "we" feel when confronted with the "Other" (as we saw in Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant"). Two authors who dealt speacifically with the "Barbarians" are Konstantin Kavafy, a Greek poet of the 19th-20th centuries; and J.M.Coetzee, a South African contemporary novelits, who took the title from Kavafy's poem to write a novel.

Please click on the link below to read the poem by Kavafy

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/181780

The post-colonial theory we introduced last week will be very helpful, as well as Border Theory, which we'll talk about in class.

Also, please think deeply about the questions below, and be ready to do assignment 5 in class, in pairs.

ASSIGNMENT 4 (Module 2)

In "Shooting an Elephant", Orwell states, "I did not even know that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it." (paragraph 2). We are reading this text 80 years later; so we are witnesses of what the "younger empires" have done or are doing nowadays.