THE ASSESSMENT IS DUE BY 12.00 (mid-day) on 20 May 2020 but may be submitted any time before that date. This assessment is worth 100% of the overall mark for the module.
HOW TO SUBMIT: An electronic copy through Turnitin: see your Student Guide for further information.
Answer only ONE of the assessment questions. Whichever question you choose, you are required to build an argument based on close analysis of a set text or set texts from the module. Do not repeat material offered for assessment on this and on other modules.
THE WORD LIMIT is 1600 words. You may exceed or go under the word limit by no more than 40 words. Short work or over-long work may lose marks.
The term ‘word limit’ means the words in the body of your essay, including quotations. References, footnotes and bibliographical details should be ignored in counting the number of words used.
STYLE: follow the guidelines on presentation in the MHRA Style guide (available free online at http://www.mhra.org.uk/Publications/Books/StyleGuide/)
1. How does Sigmund Freud’s account of the unconscious call into question conventional ways of understanding who we are and what we do?
2. What happens to Arthur Conan Doyle’s ‘Charles Augustus Milverton’ when Catherine Belsey reads it in order to draw out what she calls ‘the unconscious of the work’?
3. Why might Roland Barthes have felt the need to celebrate ‘the death of the Author’? Your answer should include reference to a specific example or examples of fiction.
4. Why might realism in fiction be both problematic and pleasurable? Your answer should include reference to a specific example or examples of fiction.
5. How might Edward Said’s theory of Orientalism be enlisted to read either Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone or Gustave Flaubert’s account of visiting Egypt?
6. Is Orientalism, as defined by Edward Said, a thing of the past? Your answer should include reference to a specific example or examples of fiction
7. Why does Virginia Woolf imagine that Shakespeare had a sister named Judith, and how is this imagining related to the feminist concerns of A Room of One’s Own?
8. ‘Re-vision – the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction – is for women more than a chapter in cultural history: it is an act of survival’ (Adrienne Rich). To what extent could Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories be described as an act of feminist ‘re-vision’?
9. How might our understanding of Henry James’s ‘The Beast in the Jungle’ change ‘as soon as an assumed heterosexual male norm is at all interrogated’ (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick)?
Additional note from Prof. Neil Badmington: ‘If you would like to use the time between now and 20 May to make changes to the essay that you have already uploaded, that’s absolutely fine. We will need to ask the ENCAP undergraduate office to let you know how we remove the essay that you have already uploaded so that you can resubmit it when you are ready. We don’t set up the portals or have any control over them, so I’m copying my reply to the UG email account. Someone will get back to you as soon as possible.‘
Zainab Alqublan's Workspace 