Your task for this essay is to create a document that responds to Amitav Ghosh’s novel, Sea of Poppies. Just like with Rizal, the main goal here is to analyze or interpret some aspect of the novel within a context of your choice.
One way of doing this would be to consider something that literary scholar Fredric Jameson wrote (Links to an external site.): “Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” Consider replacing capitalism with a word of your choosing. Sea of Poppies takes up many of the problems of our own world, but locates them in the past. What does the novel tell us about the persistence of inequality? Why is it so hard to imagine the end of sexism, or the end of empire? This is just a suggestion to spur your thinking. If it’s getting in the way, ignore it.
If you haven’t been able to read much of the novel, consider some of the strategies outlined here.
Considerations
You can’t write about the whole novel, and it would be a mistake to try. So it’s best to start narrow: what do you care about? What do you remember? What’s surprising and what disturbs you?
If you care about the novel as a creative production, you could analyze how its parts work together (the wide cast of characters, the plot that appears and disappears, the long speeches and boisterous dialogue.) Or, how they don’t work together. If you care about the issues in the novel (inequality, racism, sexism, violence, education, art, revolution), then you could consider what the novel tells us about those issues – and how they connect to the present.
In other words, it will be important at some point to figure out a context for your essay. What is the “outside” of this novel, and how does it relate to the inside? That’s just a way of stepping outside of whatever it is that you find. That also gets at the important question: what does a novel (or other works of art and narrative) actually do? What can a novel convey that can’t be conveyed in a documentary or textbook or news article?
If nothing else, you could start from an obvious parallel: you’re a university student encountering a novel about university students. Do their challenges feel like the challenges of your own life? How do we balance our everyday concerns with the collective concerns discussed here?
Requirements:
-About 4 pages double-spaced, in 12pt Times New Roman font, with 1-inch margins
-A title! Titles are a great place to hint at what you care about, and what your reader should pay attention to
Contact me if you need any clarification on anything. This assignment allows a lot of freedom as long as you stay on track of the book.
