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Engl 302 Final

The document provides the directions for a final exam essay for an English literature course. Students are asked to write a 5-6 page double-spaced essay focusing on the last two novels read, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison and Dogeaters by Jessica Hagedorn. The essay question asks students to analyze how each writer depicts social violence and the forces/violences they aim to critique through their literary works set in modern contexts. Students are to discuss what each novelist tries to make readers aware of and how viewing modernity as structured by violence enables them to critique beauty, identity formation, and visions of a unified social order.

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272 views

Engl 302 Final

The document provides the directions for a final exam essay for an English literature course. Students are asked to write a 5-6 page double-spaced essay focusing on the last two novels read, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison and Dogeaters by Jessica Hagedorn. The essay question asks students to analyze how each writer depicts social violence and the forces/violences they aim to critique through their literary works set in modern contexts. Students are to discuss what each novelist tries to make readers aware of and how viewing modernity as structured by violence enables them to critique beauty, identity formation, and visions of a unified social order.

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© © All Rights Reserved
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ENGL 302 B

Chandan Reddy

Final Exam
Directions: Please offer a well thought out, well organized, and grammatically clean response to
the following question. In answering the question, I recommend focusing on a specific instance
in one or more of the texts weve read. Use that instance to explain to me how you think the
writer and/or the text approach the question discussed below. In other words, attend closely to a
scene, its figurative language and metaphors, and how it expresses the texts formal qualities. But
you are not restricted to close-reading. You can also make arguments about the text as a whole,
just back it up with evidence or examples. You are welcome to write about more than one book.
The question is specific to the last two novels we read for the quarter: Bluest Eye, and Dogeaters.
Hence, your essay must focus on one or both of these texts. Lastly, please double-space your
essay, using 12pt. font. While 5-6 pages should be sufficient to adequately complete the final,
you should not exceed 10 typed double-spaced pages.
Question:
Cultural critic Franco Moretti argues that youth is the symbolic hero or central figure of
modernity because it offers an apt metaphor of the ceaselessness with which we experience
change, transformation, destruction and direction under capitalism. As Marx aptly argues, under
the revolutionizing and contradictory force that is capital, all that is solid melts into air. And
yet, youth is also metaphorically apt because its goal is supposedly maturity, understood as the
achievement of a stable identity, relinquishment of ones former position as merely youthful,
and gaining the kind of desire that drives one to freely chooses the values and goals of the
reigning order in society. In the classical novel the youthful hero develops the skill to internalize
and manage the contradictions of modern social processes, achieving finally a reconciliation with
the social order. In other words, if youth is the symbolic hero of modernity, achieving identity is
the symbolic goal and narrative structure of modernity, where identity is also a oneness and unity
with the social order or social whole from which youth originally broke-off.
The two novels we have read that attend to late twentieth century modernity each return to the
figure of youth as the symbolic hero of modernity. But in this instance, youth in each novel has
the role of revealing the violences that order their world. Whether speaking about Claudia in the
Bluest Eye or the numerous youth of Dogeatersfrom Joey Sands, to Rio and Pucha, to the
beauty queen turned revolutionary, to name a few youth for these women writers of color offer
the opportunity for a critique of modernity or a different representation of it.
Focusing on one or both texts from the second half of class how does each writer depict social
violence? What are the violences or forces each writer is concerned to address in the context they
are writing about? What do you think each novelist is trying to make us aware of as readers?
How does seeing modernity as a structure of violence enable them to critique the affirmation of
beauty, the drive for identity or visions of society as a unified social whole?
*******************Good Luck******************

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