Potential Choices
Answer the two following questions, when answering the two questions include these primary poems below in your response: (3 poems for each questions) Harold Pinter (The Dumb Waiter), Doris Lessing (To Room 19) Margaret Atwood (Death by Landscape) Alice Munro (Walker Brothers Cowboy) E. M. Forster (The Other Boat) Salman Rushdie (The Prophets Hair) Questions 1 1. Twentieth-century authors like these six for thee exam were often critical of the mid-Victorians like Tennyson past authors that had seemed to be so serious or dogmatic about morals or about a faith in authority. Parenting or mentoring might be considered, in this context, as a kind of authority that is eroding or that is being criticized. How did selected authors mock or satirize or criticize the Victorian sense of moral authority in these later works? Lessing, Forster, Atwood, and Rushdie, might fit this perspective, from among our list of authors, but consider others as appropriate to your discussion? Question 2 2. Narration/telling/meta-fiction: Meta-fiction, which we discussed in relation to Lessing and Pinter, could be a starting point: to what extent is the story of a given literary work also about storymaking itself the possibilities and impossibilities of making up stories? Characters may be motivated to control reality, or to explain their own reality satisfactorily, by devising a story about it. Identity might also be at stake: characters may want to figure out who they are by telling a story that explains them. This might be an element within a story/work, or it may be definitive. Potential choices include but are not limited to the following: Pinter, Atwood, Lessing, Forster, Rushdie, and Munro?
