Due Date: MONDAY DECEMBER 17 BY 5PM IN MY OFFICE (JFT 414)
NOTE: This assignment is a two-part project. You are going to submit a rough draft of your paper to me in class on Monday, December 3. Detailed instructions for the Rough Draft are available in the Assignments section of BB.
Please write a comprehensive MINIMUM SIX (6) to EIGHT (8) page essay analyzing and interpreting IN DETAIL a text of your choosing (short story, novel, poetry, film/film sequence). It is required that you use at least one concept/idea/reading we have dealt with and/or discussed in class AFTER the midterm point of the semester (AFTER OCTOBER 22). ALSO, you need to incorporate AT LEAST 2 library sources to support your thesis and the interpretive structure of the paper.
Potential thesis examples include:
the role of food in the construction of (feminine) immigrant subjectivity (in Lahiri and/or Chehade); spatial/domestic construction of immigrant subjectivity (in Lahiri and/or Chehade); the role of trauma in the immigrant narratives (in Lahiri and/or Chehade); the place of literature in the immigrant narrative (in Lahiri; Ashoke’s obsession with Nikolai Gogol); intersections between Gogol’s The Overcoat and Lahiri’s The Namesake (common themes, the question of “finding oneself,” finding one’s subjectivity); the construction of the immigrant, racial “Other” in the immigrant narratives (in Lahiri and/or Chehade); the problem of naming in Lahiri’s The Namesake; the sociopolitical context and its incorporation into Fuller’s memoir narrative; the inversion of the problem of racism in Fuller’s Don’t Let’s go to the Dogs Tonight; the intricacies and the shortcomings of the memoir narrative format (in Fuller); etc.
In this assignment, you should provide a detailed analysis of the selected medium (short story, novel, poetry, film/film sequence). You can cite passages from the theoretical essay/essays as they pertain to