ENGL 341: Modern Fiction (Summer 2015)
Take-home essay (25%). For detailed instructions and a sample essay, click here. (Modern Fiction is understood to be written between roughly 1900 and 1960.) Be sure to specify what topic you’re writing on, and make sure to have a clear thesis statement.
1. “The history of the novel,” writes Frank Kermode in The Sense of an Ending, “is a history of anti-novels.” Use this claim to discuss one of the concerns of modern fiction.
2. One of Virginia Woolf’s claims for women’s writing is that it “broke the sentence” and “broke the sequence” (A Room of One’s Own, Chapter V). She says the same for modern fiction more generally in her essay “Modern Fiction.” Based on Woolf’s statements about plot and grammar, discuss the relationship between the formal techniques of modern fiction and feminism. (NB there is no reason not to cite male as well as female authors.)
3. How do issues of race OR gender manifest themselves in modern fiction?
4. Discuss how modern fiction deals with the problem of development.
5. Discuss how modern fiction deals with the problems of the Nation and nationalism.
6. How does modern fiction deal with the promises and/or dangers of technology OR urban space?
7. Who are the heroes of modern fiction? How are they heroic?
8. Write an essay exploring “the power of art and the art of power” as it is manifested in modern fiction.
Modern Fiction 