Throughout this term, we’ve been practicing four seemingly distinct skills: learning how to read, summarise, and engage with theoretical texts; learning how to close read and analyse novels and poetry; learning how to “apply” theory to texts; and learning how to use literary texts to open up, interrogate, and challenge theoretical texts and concepts. For this assessed essay you will unite these different skills, bringing literature, culture, and theory together. You are also encouraged to challenge conventional distinctions between theory and literary texts (broadly conceived to include poetry, music, and so forth). Thus you may wish to treat the literary texts as theorisations or read the theoretical texts as literary texts.

Answer ONE of the following questions:

1. Write an essay that makes an argument about how a literary text (including the novel or poems/cycles of poems/book of poetry) either perpetuate or challenge dominant ideologies? For this essay, make sure you clearly define the term "ideology" based on the relevant texts and then illustrate your claim with one literary text.
    
2. Write a an essay that develops a argument based on comparing 2-3 theoretical approaches to reading poetry (you can draw here from the readings for Unit 1 or 2) and illustrate your comparison through an engagement with one of the poems or songs. Ideally, you want to connect these theoretical approaches by identifying a key debate or central problematic.
   
   
3. I Love Dick is often considered to be as much a theoretical as a literary text. Write an essay that positions Kraus’ novel within one of the theoretical topics that we have covered in Term 1 and make an argument about how the novel takes up or engages in that topic. You might want to consider which critics Kraus is in conversation with and how and what topics or issues her novel is, itself, theorising?
   
   
4. Write a comparative essay that makes an argument about the possibilities and limits of two feminist approaches we’ve studied in Term 1. You must draw on at least one theoretical and one literary text, but can either compare two theoretical texts and illustrate them with one literary or compare one theoretical and one literary text. Ideally, you want to connect these theoretical approaches by identifying a key debate or central problematic in feminist theory.
   
   
5. Write an essay that makes an argument about the importance of the concept of the “unconscious” for understanding literature and culture. To make your claim, put one of the theoretical and one of the literary texts in conversation, though how you do so is up to you. Make sure you carefully define how your authors theorise the unconscious.
   
   

6. Adonis’ “Poetry and Modernity” makes an argument for how relations of imperialism, or economic “dependency,” put pressure on, and shape cultural and social forms in various ways. Write an essay that brings together one of the works of poetry and one of the theoretical texts on poetics that analyses the ways that one or two poems stages take up, wrestle with , or resist the relationship between economic and cultural forms of imperialism.

7. In their introduction to Breath and Precarity, Myung Mi Kim and Cristanne Miller write that "poetics is as much a process of generating conceptual modes as it is a practice resulting in poetry." Write an essay that brings together one of the works of poetry and one of the theoretical texts on poetics and develop an argument about how the work of poetry intervenes in or challenges how we think about interlocking social, historical, or political problems.
   
   
8. In "Projective Verse," Charles Olson writes that "the HEAD, by way of the EAR, to the SYLLABLE / the HEART, by way of the BREATH, to the LINE" and in "Breath and Precarity" and Nathaniel Mackey writes that "Black music says, as does an allied, radically pneumatic poetics, that breath, especially imperilled breath, matters." Write an essay that brings together one of the works of poetry and one of the texts on poetics to make an argument about the importance of breath to the poem(s).
   
   
9. Christina Sharpe coins the term "wake work" to describe certain kinds of aesthetic production, forms of consciousness, and ways of living that critically take up and engage with the "wake" or legacy of the transatlantic slave trade. Write an essay that considers how one or two poems we've read this term engage in wake work. Please note that this essay should include a critical engagement of Sharpe's theory in relation to your readings of the poems.
   
   
10. Write an essay that makes a claim for how one of the literary texts we’ve read in Term 1 engages with history on both the level of content and form? While you want to pay attention to questions of representation, but also questions of style and form. You will want to draw on at least one theoretical text here to support your reading.

For each essay, you’re being asked to do two key things. First, drawing on your précis assignment, you’re being asked to explicate your key-term or concept (e.g. the unconscious, ideology, breath, poetics). Second, you’re being asked to engage in original, interpretive analysis of your key literary text.

Above all, remember that this assignment – as with most of the essays and exams you’ll write at Warwick – is argument-driven. Even when you’re comparing texts, you still want to be making a strong (rather than weakly descriptive) claim based on the evidence of the text and its implication in a wider world. Please note: some secondary research is expected.