Mikhail Bakhtin Case Study - Reflects the Historical Emergence - English Assignment Help

Assignment Task :

Topic 1
Taking the opening chapter of Cry the Beloved Country as a starting point, discuss the extent to which the novel is critical, or not critical, of land dispossession and labour exploitation in South Africa. Bear in mind that the novel was published in 1948, a few months before the apartheid-era Nationalist Party came to power.
 In your answer you should reference and analyse:
• the different descriptions of Ixopo and Ndotsheni by the narrative voice in the first chapter of Cry the Beloved Country;
• the effects of the Natives Land Act of 1913 and the extent to which these are reflected in the novel;
• the way the novel represents black South Africans who go to live in the city of Johannesburg;
• the representation of voices who are critical of the oppressive racial system in the novel, from the voices of black characters such as John Kumalo and Dubula to that of the white liberal, Arthur Jarvis;
• also please discuss representations of women in the novel.
 

Topic 2
Mikhail Bakhtin identifies five types of the Bildungsroman and the fifth of these types resembles Abrahams’s choice in Mine Boy. About this type, Bakhtin has the following to say:
In such novels human emergence is no longer man’s private affair. He emerges along with the world and he reflects the historical emergence of the world itself. He is no longer within an epoch, but on the border between two epochs, at the transition point from one to the other. The transition is accomplished in him and through him. He is forced to become a new, unprecedented type of human being. What is happening here is precisely the emergence of a new man. The organizing force held by the future is therefore extremely great here – and this is not, of course, the private biographical future, but the historical future. It is as though the very foundations of the world are changing, and man must change along with them. [. . .] The image of the emerging man begins to surmount its private nature (within certain limits, of course) and enters into a completely new, spatial sphere of historical existence. Such is the last, realistic type of novel of emergence. (Bakhtin, M., Speech Genres and Other Late Essays, 1987: 23-24)
Using the above as your starting point, discuss Peter Abrahams’s Mine Boy as a Bildungsroman. In your essay, pay close attention to Abrahams’s representation of the protagonist, Xuma, as the man “on the border between two epochs, at the transition point from one to the other.”

Topic 3

Examine the two extracts below, from Cry, the Beloved Country (1948) and Mine Boy (1946) respectively. Using these extracts as starting points, write an essay comparing and contrasting the representation of gender and of gender relations in the two novels. Remember to analyse and discuss the two extracts below. Also remember that every paragraph of your essay should include quotes with references.
He went out of the door, and she watched him through the little window, walking slowly to the door of the church. Then she sat down at the table, and put her head on it, and was silent, with the patient suffering of black women, with the suffering of oxen, with the suffering of any that are mute. (Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country, chapter 2)
A couple stepped into the ring. With commanding movements the man called the woman to him and told her to go on her knees in front of him. Disdainfully the woman danced away. Again the man commanded. The woman ignored him. He made to grab her. She danced away and evaded him.
The women in the ring applauded her, the men encouraged the man. (Abrahams, Mine Boy, chapter 5)
 

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