Hebdomadal 12

This is the last hebdomadal assignment! Can you believe it? Are you sad? I am.

This is your chance to show everything you've learned this semester: your proficiency with close reading, your skill at analysis, your familiarity with the language of literary criticism.

Topic 1: Asking questions of Coetzee

Last week we talked through the process of finding the questions a text compels us to ask. Articulate and explore one of the questions you see at the heart of Disgrace.

Topic 2: Politics and literature

How effectively can literature cope with or respond to socio-political problems? You can write exclusively about Disgrace, or you can compare Disgrace to Boland or Morrison or Yeats, or you can write somewhat more generally (though with reference to texts) about what you see as the guiding problems with literature's socio-political relevance.