Exam on Tuesday: The Take-Home Essay

For your essay on Tuesday, you will have 3 short answer questions and one longer essay question.  The topics will be focused on Conrad, Tutuola, and the theoretical ideas that inform their work, such as Ngugi wa Thiong'o, Brantlinger, and Freud.  Below is the take-home essay question which you can get a head start on now if you wish.  It will be due the Tuesday after you take the exam. 

PART III: Take-Home Essay (or, a rough draft for the Final Paper)

For your take-home essay question, I want you to basically lay the groundwork for your final paper.  This will ultimately be a 5-6 page paper using at least two works from class along with secondary/theoretical sources.  But that’s for later.  For now, I want you to respond to the following prompt in a 2-3 page essay that will form the rough draft of your future paper, meaning it will be the basis for what you adapt into a larger, more researched paper. 

THE QUESTION:

In Reader-Response Criticism, critics often refer to an intended reader that is implied by the narrative voice.  This is a reader who is more or less created by the text, and who we must in some sense become to understand the work.  As Ross C. Murfin explains in “What is Reader Response Criticism?” (in our edition of Heart of Darkness),

“Only “by agreeing to play the role of this created audience,” Susan Suleiman explains, “can an actual reader correctly understand and appreciate the work”…Gerard Genette and Gerald Prince prefer to speak of “the naratee,…the necessary counterpart of a given narrator, that is, the person or figure who receives a narrative,”…Iser employs the term “the implied reader,” but he also uses “the educated reader”… (120). 

Using either Conrad or Tutuola, consider what the narrator assumes or asks of the reader: who are “we”?  Are we English?  Male?  What ideas, biases, assumptions, fears, or desires do we have?  What knowledge do we share?  What insights and secrets are we privy to?  What do we know that other characters in this world do not?  What relationship do we share with the narrative voice?  Conversely, who might not be addressed by this narrator…and how intentional is this? 

No sources are required for this, but you must quote from the book in question to support your reading.  Also, be specific; the less specific you are, and the more you generalized, the less points I can give you for your essay.  Good luck!