ENGL 201-50 (Honors World Literature)
Professor E. Derek Taylor
Topic sheet for Comparison Essay
Due: Thursday, 4-30-15 (email as attachment or submit through Canvas)
Instructions: Write a six-page comparison essay (1800-2000 words) based on the topic below. Your final submission should follow MLA in all matters of format and citation. No outside research is required, but you may decide that your particular line of inquiry demands consulting texts other than the two novels. Any such sources must be acknowledged and properly documented in accordance with MLA standards.
Topic: Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood and Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being are novels consumed with that most fundamental of human experiences: the passing of time. In your essay, compare the ways these two texts grapple with futures that become present, and presents that become past. You might choose to focus on the formal decisions of the two authors as they imagined and arranged their respective narratives—the characters they chose to create, the settings they chose to establish for them, the way the plot is presented to us as readers. (The operative question here being “why?” For instance: there is nothing necessary or obvious about the points of view each novelist chose to use in recounting his/her plot). Or perhaps you will choose to enter into the world of the novels themselves and analyze the various ways characters attempt to negotiate their individual sense of what it means to exist in, and to be conscious of, the one-way flow of passing moments. Do particular characters handle their relationship to time better, or worse, than others? Why?
Of course, it may well be that you have something else related to the treatment of time in these novels that you’d like to pursue. By all means, do so—just check in with me ahead of time so that we can be sure you aren’t, ahem, wasting your time.
Professor E. Derek Taylor
Topic sheet for Comparison Essay
Due: Thursday, 4-30-15 (email as attachment or submit through Canvas)
Instructions: Write a six-page comparison essay (1800-2000 words) based on the topic below. Your final submission should follow MLA in all matters of format and citation. No outside research is required, but you may decide that your particular line of inquiry demands consulting texts other than the two novels. Any such sources must be acknowledged and properly documented in accordance with MLA standards.
Topic: Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood and Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being are novels consumed with that most fundamental of human experiences: the passing of time. In your essay, compare the ways these two texts grapple with futures that become present, and presents that become past. You might choose to focus on the formal decisions of the two authors as they imagined and arranged their respective narratives—the characters they chose to create, the settings they chose to establish for them, the way the plot is presented to us as readers. (The operative question here being “why?” For instance: there is nothing necessary or obvious about the points of view each novelist chose to use in recounting his/her plot). Or perhaps you will choose to enter into the world of the novels themselves and analyze the various ways characters attempt to negotiate their individual sense of what it means to exist in, and to be conscious of, the one-way flow of passing moments. Do particular characters handle their relationship to time better, or worse, than others? Why?
Of course, it may well be that you have something else related to the treatment of time in these novels that you’d like to pursue. By all means, do so—just check in with me ahead of time so that we can be sure you aren’t, ahem, wasting your time.