English 398: Critical Writing

Assignment for Paper #3 (due the last day of class, on Wednesday, November 28)

This essay assignment is designed to familiarize you with the methods of interpretation discussed by Lynn in chapter 6 of Texts and Contexts: "Connecting the Text: Historical, Postcolonial, and Cultural Studies." Given the focus of the assignment, you will need to consult some sources other than those on our course syllabus. Specifically, drawing on those sources and on the ideas discussed in Lynn's chapter, you will need to connect Amis's novel Time's Arrow to cultural and historical contexts that are relevant for interpreting the novel. The following are some suggested contexts to investigate in this connection, but you may well identify other contexts that you would prefer to write about:

--Strategies by which, after the end of WWII, ex-Nazis migrated to and assumed new identities in other countries (especially the U.S.)
--The experiences and life-histories of Nazi doctors in particular
--Schloss Hartheim and, more generally, the Nazi practice of "euthanasia killing"
--Post-WWII Portugal and what life was like there right after the war ended
--The role of the Catholic Church vis-a-vis the Holocaust
--Historical accounts (including eye-witness testimony) of practices at concentration camps such as Birkenau and Auschwitz
--Accounts of the psychological and emotional effects of trauma suffered (or inflicted) in the context of the Holocaust
--Josef Mengele

As we will discuss in class, the New Historicists and practitioners of Cultural Studies have contrasted their approaches with that used by the "old historicists," who think of literary texts as mere reflections or mirrors of the historical contexts from which they emerged. The newer historical approaches instead envision texts and contexts as being situated on the same plane: representations of fictional characters and events may alter the way we think about history, just as placing a text in its historical situation (a situation to which we can gain access only through other texts) can illuminate that text in new ways. In other words, instead of asking us to think about how a literary text reflects the past, the more recent historicist approaches ask us to think about the past itself as a constellation or universe of texts--texts of all kinds. And if the only way we can get access to the past is through texts, this means that literature doesn't merely reflect but also (in conjunction with other sorts of texts) helps constitute what we know about history.

Accordingly, in completing this assignment you should not merely note the historical details to which Amis alludes in his novel. Rather, you should focus on how Amis places his novel in dialogue with history. What aspects of the historical record does the novel foreground, and what aspects does it background? How does the historical setting relate to (complement, underscore, complicate, undercut) the major themes developed in the novel? How might historically or culturally oriented approaches like the ones Lynn discusses in chapter 6 need to be modified or adjusted when it comes to historically self-aware texts like Amis's? In other words, Amis's novel is in a sense already engaged in an active reinterpretation of history itself. How does that affect our own attempts to interpret the novel by putting it into dialogue with other texts about the past?

In researching this assignment you should use at least 4 outside sources, at least two of which should be articles in scholarly journals. In this connection, note that in many cases the library's electronic databases (for example, the MLA bibliography) allow you to get the content of scholarly articles right on your desktops. Other articles may be publicly available on the internet. Wherever you scout out your sources, please do your best to make sure that the sources are authoritative and reliable (see Lynn, pp. 257-58, and Hacker, pp. 103-110, for strategies you can use to evaluate the reliability of online sources). And you should also feel free to ask a reference librarian (or me) if you need additional assistance.

Please provide a list of Works Cited formatted in MLA or Modern Language Association style (described by Hacker in her chaper on MLA papers; you can also find details about MLA formatting online). Note: your Works Cited page need not be included in your total word count.