TERM PAPER 2009-2010

LITS3303 MODERN CRITICAL THEORY

BASED ON MODULE ONE

Answer ONE (1) of the following questions, referring closely to the text(s) of the theorist in question:

1. Referring to some of Marx's key concepts such as the 'Base/Superstructure model' and the 'dialectic,' discuss what you understand by a Marxist model of society and culture.

2. Georg Lukács argues that the truly historical literary work "by its very nature offers a truer, more complete, more vivid and more dynamic reflection of reality than the receptant otherwise possesses." Discuss the conception of ‘realism’ advanced in his “Art and Objective Truth.”

3. What does Lucien Goldmann mean when he writes, in "The Genetic Structuralist Method in the History of Literature," that the

relations between the truly important work and the social group, which – through the medium of the creator – is, in the last resort, the true subject of creation, are of the same order as relations between the elements of the work and the work as a whole. (158)

4. Referring closely to "The Artist in the Caribbean," discuss C. L. R. James' claim that the "analysis of the artist in the Caribbean properly done" (183) is a "pointer to the general social and political problems there" (183).

5. What role, according to Ngugi wa Thiong'o in "Literature and Society: the Politics of the Canon," does literature play in the colonial and neo-colonial periods of African history?

6. “Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched every time we have to do with the colonial problem” (Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth). Discuss, in the light of this quotation, the six (6) categories which Chidi Amuta proposes for the study of African literature in The Theory of African Literature.

DEADLINE: 5 pm, Thursday March 18, 2010

LENGTH: 7-10 pages (double-spaced)

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