100% assessed by two 4,000-word essays

Essay tips:
Dr Ross Forman Link opens in a new window

Term 1

For this term, you will develop your own essay topic in consultation with Dr Forman.

By Week 8, you should submit, by email, a description of your topic that is NO LONGER THAN ONE PARAGRAPH. You should identify what the working thesis statement for your essay will be. We will then provide oral or written feedback on your proposal.

There is no requirement for the essay to be comparative, but you should fee free to do a comparative essay, if you wish. You should write on a text or texts from the module, although we are happy to consider topics that bring in literature not covered in the module, as well. The expectation is that your essay will engage with some of the critical concepts discussed in seminar.

TERM 2

Second Assessed Essay Topics

Essays due in April (Term 3) by 12 noon.

Late submissions will incur a penalty of 5 marks per day.

Note: Please consult the Department website and/or the Student Handbook for guidance on essay submission on Tabula and penalties for late submission. http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/currentstudents/undergraduate/essay

Please also make note of the Departmental regulations on Plagiarism. For all bibliographic citations, primary and secondary, use the MLA Guidelines, a link to which is provided on the Department webpage for Undergraduate Studies. http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/writingprog/academicwriting/english/

Please save an electronic copy of your essay until final results are announced. You might also want to save it for future reference, or if you intend to study beyond the B.A. degree.

Write a 4000-word essay on any one of the following topics.

1. Explore how the idea of the global city is nestled within a network of spaces, from rural, semi-rural to regional and national centres to global nodes of power. With reference to any one or more of the texts considered this term, write an essay analysing the spatial discontinuties of the global city.

2. What paradoxes of history (colonialism, nationalism, postcolonial development, neoliberal capitalism) are registered in terms of understanding the complex processes of globalization as an urban process? Write an essay exploring this question using one or more texts considered this term.

3. Write an essay analysing the ways in which the idea of the global city is transformed when we look at it/read it/experience it through the frame of gender difference. How is gender registered as a dissonant discourse and practice in any one or more of the texts considered in the module this term?

4. One key mode of apprehending the global city is through visual apparatuses of film, video, television, photographs, and image archives. Write an essay exploring visuality as a contested practice in the global city. You may choose to integrate photographs, film, video or other visual sources as part of your essay. If you choose to do this, your project will have to be accompanied by a 2,500-word commentary.

5. Who belongs to the global city? How does the contemporary global city challenge our settled notions of citizenship, migrancy and home in the city? Using one or more of the texts considered this term, write an essay exploring the precariousness of belonging in the global city today. Alternatively, you may want to write this essay as an ethnography of a particular location (involving interviews, historical research and observation and other forms of analysis), or a memoir of your own relationship to urban space. Your creative project will need to demonstrate your understanding of some of the key ideas discussed in the module.

6. Many of the texts we read on this module this term explore the relationship between subjectivity (the process by which individuals become subjects with social consciousness marked by class, race, gender, etc.) and material questions of housing, real estate, work, water, transport, etc. Write an essay analysing these relationships with reference to one or more of the texts we have considered.