1. How do Anglophone writers engage with the harrowing events in history such as the Middle Passage and their continuous impact?
2. How do contemporary literature and arts refigure the past, the present and the future, inspiring different kinds of futures?
3. How do new readings/readers approach the representations and imagining of the ocean and kinship differently?
Category: Globalization
Aesthetics of the Ocean
• What aesthetic strategies do writers/art practitioners deploy to foreground the ocean?
• To what extent can new literatures draw attention to, and re(story) the ocean and kinship in the era of the Anthropocene?
• How is climate change shaping the representations and imagining of the ocean?
Reading Films
1. How is new film, as an aesthetic, social, cultural and technological form, shaped by and shapes local and global contexts?
2. How does new Anglophone film engage with historical, sociocultural, geopolitical, economic and environmental issues?
Displacement and Diaspora
1. How does Anglophone engage with and respond to the refugee crisis?
2. How does contemporary short fiction represent the experiences of the displaced?
Ecocriticism
• Ecocriticism is a subfield of literary field and cultural studies emerged around the 1980s, exploring
the complex and various representations of nature through literatures, poetry and films. It offers an
important historical perspective of how nature has been represented across time.
Cheryll Glotfelty defines ecocriticism as “the study of the relationship between literature and the physical
environment” and poses the below questions:
• What role does the physical setting play in the plot of this novel?
• In addition to race, class, and gender, should place become a new critical category?
• In what ways has literacy itself affected humankind’s relationship to the natural world?
• How has the concept of wilderness changed over time?
• What view of nature informs U.S. Government reports, corporate advertising, and televised nature
documentaries, and to what rhetorical effect?
• What bearing might the science of ecology have on literary studies?
Writing naturecultures
1. How does contemporary writing engage with the environment and respond to escalating and insidious ecological crises?
2. How does contemporary literature shape and are shaped by environmental thoughts and action?
3. How might new literary work move beyond anthropocentric (human-centred) perspectives?
The former imperial centers
In what ways might English be reclaimed and repurposed by contemporary writers from outside the former imperial centers?
The colonial legacy of the language
How do postcolonial/neocolonial writing in English wrestle with the colonial legacy of the language and the entangled social-cultural, political and environmental issues?
Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Write the Thematic paper on Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. You must provide your own title for the paper and it has to have 1200 words . Topics could be on love, nature, death, age, etc as implied specifically in the poem, but not your own generalization of these topics outside of the content of the poem. Use just ONE topic. Try and analyze as much as you can of the poem to make the paper an analytical essay of the content of the poem.
Do not use research for this essay .Let it be your own views and analysis of the poems so it is original.
Guidelines for writing this essay:
Do not give a biography of the poet in this paper. You may refer to their life only if is within the content of the poems addressed, but there will be no paragraph dedicated to the life of the poet. I do not need a list of the works written either.
Choose one theme: Topics could be on love, nature, death, age, etc as implied specifically in the poem, but not your own generalization of these topics outside of the content of the poems.. in other words, do not spend lines of philosophizing your ideas on this topic. Let the whole essay focus on the content of the poem
When you use direct lines, avoid quoting more than three to five lines at a time. You are better off using fewer lines and then discussing them. Do not follow one quotation by another. Your paper should not have more than 35% quoted lines. Do not copy and pasted the whole poem. You do not need to use intext cittions when you use the direct lines. Just use quotation marks.
You may what to focus on a topic- the speaker, the meaning of the poem, the imagery used, language.
Write a short summary of the poem (Kubla Klan).
then analyze this poem with the elements that help your thesis.
“When a Classmate is a Former Inmate”
For this writing assignment, you will analyze the structure and technique in “When a Classmate is a Former Innmate.” In a well-developed essay, please answer the three questions below. Be sure to provide textual evidence from the essay to support your answers.
What method of introduction – brief story, stating importance of topic, or broad-to-narrow – does Lantigua-Willimas use, and why do you think she chose this way to begin her article?
What patterns of development (description, exemplification, compare/contrast, etc.) are the most dominant in the essay?
What type of tone does the author use throughout the essay? Why do you think she adopts this tone, and is it effective?