The One Vs. The Many

        "Does a novel focus on one life or many?" This deceptively simple question was posed by Stanford literature professor Alex Woloch. From Woloch's question, you must invent a specific thesis of your own by referring to two texts from the course. For example, you might look at the presence of minor chatacters. What strategies does the narrative use to focus attention on them? Are minor characters "flat" or «rounded'? How does the narrative attend to marginalized figures in the society of the novel (e.g. animals, children, characters who are socially, economically, or ethnically othered? Do minor figures take away from the representation of the protagonist, or do they add the portrayal of a main character? Does poetry allow in the same way for the representation of minor and major characters? In all cases, you should consider how literary form and style support the claims you are making, and you should perform close readings. YOU MUST REFER TO ANY TWO (2) TEXTS FROM THE LIST BELOW: Marie de France, The Lais of Marie de France (Penguin, tr; Burgess and Busby) Dante, Inferno (Bantam, tr. Mandelbaum) Shakespeare, Othello (Oxford World’s Classics; not Oxford School Shakespeare) Cervantes, Don Quixote (Harper Collins, tr. Grossman) Austen, Pride and Prejudice (Oxford) Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment (Vintage, trs. Volokhonsky, Pevear) Kafka, Metamorphosis (W. W. Norton, tr. Bernofsky) Woolf, To the Lighthouse (Harcourt) Césaire, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (Wesleyan, tr. Eshleman) Morrison, Song of Solomon (Vintage) Rankine, Citizen: An American Lyric (Graywolf) Kim, Commons (U California)