PART A – 20 marks
Each choice of topic of Part A has been designed so that you only need to read and refer to the course texts as discussed in the lectures. You should have a minimum of two direct quotations, at least one from each of your sources, integrated into your essay.
However, for PART A it is also acceptable to use additional sources to enrich the essay (and the 500 word limit is a minimum – the Essay may be longer than that, if you wish). We would recommend the following as possible additional sources:
a) for Marshall McLuhan, you could watch the film McLuhan’s Wake , to get some more helpful information about the linear-literate mentality and how McLuhan challenged it, both among his academic peers and in pop culture.
b) for Dorothy Lee, we have posted additional readings from her book Freedom and Culture , discussing differences between mainstream North American culture and the Dakota people regarding the linked issues of freedom and responsibility. While the focus is not explicitly on ‘nonlinearity vs. linearity’ here, it’s easy to see the ideas at work in each of the additional chapters.
c) for Homer, you might want to examine further/other books (i.e., chapters) of the text. We are reading Book 9, which largely concerns Odysseus’ encounter with Polyphemus. But other parts of the epic provide lots of other details and information. There are many editions of the Odyssey available free online, including audio-book versions (which you can cite by transcribing the relevant part(s) and giving the time-code from the recording). Please feel free to check the version you have found with Kelsey or myself – adaptations of the Odyssey and other versions of the tale not by Homer will generally not be acceptable.
-Books 10-12 consist of the rest of Odysseus’ story as told to the Phaiacians – including his visit to the house of the alluring witch, Circe, his encounter with the Sirens, and his visit to the land of the Dead.
-Books 5-8 depict Odysseus’s escape from the island of Calypso and his difficult voyage to Phaiacia – the sense of his desire for a LINEAR journey towards home is very strong in these books
-Books 15 and following detail Odysseus’ arrival home, his cunning disguise, and his plan to brutally exterminate the suitors and those serving maids who slept with them – the scene of the massacre, in book 22, could be interpreted as a prime depiction of the systematic-linear mentality at work, just as Penelope’s test of the bow, which immediately precedes it in book 21.
PART A TOPICS
CHOOSE EITHER 1, 2 or 3
1) Homer’s Odyssey is one of the oldest surviving written documents of occidental culture. It marks a very early stage of the emergence of literacy as a key feature of ‘civilization.’ In Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan noted that the shift to literacy coincided with a vast cultural transformation. ‘Literate man,’ as he put it, has different values and a different orientation from ‘Mythic man.’
QUESTION: Examine Homer’s Odyssey as a document of the transition to a literate culture, with Odysseus as a metaphorical representative of the shift. In what sense are Odysseus’ values literate values, in McLuhan’s sense?
2) In the chapter on the Trobrianders and Malinowski, Dorothy Lee describes a culture that works with an epistemology very much alien to the occidental tradition (at least, it is neither ‘red pill’ nor ‘blue pill’). She sums this epistemology up as a ‘nonlineal codification of reality.’
QUESTION: Compare the values that Odysseus represents, or that he seems to want to represent, with those of the Trobrianders as represented by Dorothy Lee.
3) The Trobrianders, while they have a very different epistemology from anything we can find in the occidental traditions, could be described in McLuhan’s terms as a ‘oral-mythic’ culture.
QUESTION: To what extent do the traits and practices Lee describes fit with McLuhan’s idea of ‘oral-mythic’ culture?
PART B – 20 marks
CHOOSE EITHER 1 or 2.
Celia’s Song
The two-headed serpent is perhaps the most general and encompassing mythic figure of Celia’s Song, a kind of supreme embodiment of everything or Supreme Being. How does the natural imagery in the opening chapters of the book reflect a colonial imbalance between Restless and Loyal, the two heads of the serpent? How do the ceremonies narrated in the story honour and restore the balance?
Please note that there is difficult emotional content involving depictions of sexual violence in this novel. If you feel this may be difficult to read for this reason, you might want to consider writing about This Place instead.
This Place
Choose two of the short graphic stories from the collection This Place. For each story: a) Summarize clearly, coherently and accurately the narrative, key characters and the general ‘idea’ of the story. b) Analyze the details of the colour-palette, text and graphic choices the author(s)/illustrators have made. How precisely do the images and the style of the graphic presentation interact creatively with the ‘idea’ of the story?