Essay

Your non-assessed course essay is due in by Tuesday of week 7 (check Turnitun and you'll see).

I'm not going to distribute essay questions for this project -- if you're interested as to what the final assessed essay questions look like, I've stuck last year's paper on Moodle: you'll see it there as a Word file at the top.

What I'd like you to do is write a 1000-1500 word essay or review about any of the novels on the course. The only constraint upon you is that you must contextualise the novel. You may choose to do this in a number of ways:

(a) you could write an essay on any of the novels contextualising it in terms of the other shortlisted titles for that year's prize: comparing and contrastng it with the other fiction published that year.

(b) you could contextualise your novel in terms of a theoretical or critical approach, discourse or genre: connect The White Tiger to postcolonial theory, for instance; read The Blind Assassin in the context of misery memoirs, or science fiction.

(c) or you could contextualise with respect to the Booker itself, take your chosen novel as a starting point for an analysis of the cultural or social significance of the prize, or prize culture more generally.