Presentation topics

Plan a presentation of about 5-7 minutes. KEY: To be effective, this should be an ARGUMENT OUTLINE. Place your outline (including quoted evidence from the piece) on a transparency or electronic medium. By making a clear point, you should get some reaction from your classmates.
20 or 24-point type shows up well. You could make handouts for the whole class, or we could also post your materials on the class webpage.

Cold Mountain -

* apply Goffman’s concept of character contest to events in the novel: does Frazier use the run-in to reveal the nature of his character(s); what win/lose stakes are at stake?

* what makes a character in this novel – what makes a self? How is personality imagined? How do minds and thoughts work? What are its components?

* what kind of plot do we get here? Diagram its structure(s), relations and conflicts between characters, direction of motive forces, etc. Do we get a moment of Climax? of Recognition? More than one of these?

* Is this an epic or romance – or both? what features of each genre do you find in the novel?

* do a study of Frazier’s style – how individual sentences shape your perception, how he tends to design description; language in any aspect; is he more concrete or conceptual?  Does the term “poetics” help us read Frazier?

* compare Frazier’s style to a major American author such as Faulkner, Hemingway, or Toni Morrison. How do the two authors design their worlds, sentences, narrative point of view? (several reports on this)

* (more than one person?) Is it true that Cold Mountain follows the myth structure of Homer’s Odyssey?  The film O Brother Where Art Thou? certainly did. Before reading the novel, create a table showing the structure of the Odyssey, and keep notes on parallels and differences. Compare the novel with O Brother. Why might Southern artists want to draw on the Odyssey?

* what life was like for women in the antebellum South—perhaps extend your report to Civil War conditions and postwar conditions

* The Civil War and the world of Frazier’s novels. What were the South’s and North’s motives for war, and how does Frazier depict the relations of characters to those motives? For example, how are the protagonists’ relation to slavery depicted?

* Focus specifically on the novel’s representation of slavery and African-Americans.

* Find Charles Feidelson’s book on Symbolism and American literature in the library. Do you think Frazier draws on, perhaps transforms, the symbolist tradition?

* How might this novel be seen in relation to Ann Douglas’ The Feminization of American Culture?

* Animal imagery in the novel – symbolism? What understanding are we given of animal life in this novel, and of humans’ relations to it? What do we learn about the humans from the animals?

* Specifically, the CROWS – this is a motif or “leitmotif” throughout the novel. What is up with them as images. Are they symbolic or merely a repeating sign?

* social class: middle-class, gentility, aristocracy, servants, rank, etc in the novel—how presented?

* Dreamwork and the novel – use the model of dreams from Text Book to interpret the novel in terms of latent/manifest; condensation; displacement. Does the “work” of psychological healing take place? Are there any dreams represented in the novel? How should we interpret them?  Any surrealism?

* Anecdote and storytelling—Northerners often stereotype Southerners as storytellers (see Mark Twain’s “Jumping Frog of Calaveras county”). Does Frazier respond to that tradition? Do the ideas about Anecdote from Text Book help you notice anything about the novel?

* Serve as a professional evaluator/critic of this novel. Argue that it should/should not have won the National Book Award. Make specific judgments of its quality and its significance in all aspects of novelwriting.

* Consider Frazier as a Southern, regional writer. What is he contributing to your sense of Southern tradition? Of the land itself and people’s relation to it? Does he present a “Southern” worldview? What would that be? Do you feel it to be distinct from your own, at all? Compare his work to other Southern writers, if you can.

* Frazier’s use of epigraphs, such as the epigraphs from Darwin and Han-shan. What does  he imply with these?

* Is the idea of the Sublime relevant to reading this novel?

* Does this novel raise any social issues/problems? Is it pure entertainment, or can you list several?

* If you have seen the film version of Cold Mountain, point out how the film altered the novel’s plot, and what differences in meaning and significance that created. (Note: many people are boycotting the film because its production was moved abroad so that U.S. labor and site costs could be very cheap.)

• Describe the narrator. What kind of “ethos” does the narrative voice create?

Death and the King’s Horseman:
-  What insight(s) does Soyinka want us to come to about European colonialism/imperialism?
(You might want to find out the historical context of the play, the British empire’s relation to Nigeria.)

- “Complete the text” – What future for the nation does the play seem to point to by the end?

- What understanding of death is created by the play?

- Is Elesin a tragic hero? (define tragic hero)

- Why is poetry so important in this play?

- Is there any character contest?

- Do you agree that this play should have helped Soyinka win the Nobel Prize for Literature?

- Does a Freudian or otherwise Western view of Dream help you interpret this play? 

- Men appear to be the community’s public leaders, but what positions do women have in this society? Find out more about women and women’s roles in Nigerian society, if possible.

-defamiliarization

- the sublime? Construction of mystique?

-  allegory, parable, symbol, metaphor, any other poetics

- This play’s relation to religious tradition.

- Does this play invite us to identify with Elesin? With anyone else in the cast? What ideas do we identify with, if we do?

- Choose one of the essays in this critical reader and come up with your own view of how well it provides insight into the novel