CULTURAL ANALYSIS PAPER
Your assignment is to write a Cultural Analysis of one of the novels listed below. Most of these books should be in the SCC or Moore County Public libraries.
CULTURAL ANALYSIS
A cultural analysis is neither a book review nor a book report. You do not summarize the book.
A cultural analysis focuses on the ways in which culture which shapes the plot, characters and the view of reality as presented within the novel. We find culture most readily in setting, character’s qualities, social relationships and both social and gender roles.
PRE-READING RESEARCH
Without this very important pre-reading step, it is likely that you will be overwhelmed by information of which you are not familiar.
Do a search in NoveList Plus (SCC Library Online Databases) to learn what others have said about the novel and its author. If the novel you have chosen is not in that database, try Amazon.com.
ASSIGNMENT
Write a 1000 word (3-4 pages) cultural analysis essay based on the novel. This is a minimum requirement. You may write more than 4 pages if you feel it is necessary to adequately address your topic. Content instructions are discussed below. Post your essay to the blog. Respond to other student’s essays.
The paper is due Tuesday, November 22.
CONTENT INSTRUCTIONS
The paper should begin with an introduction that clearly indicates which book choice you have made. State title of the book and indicate which cultural group or groups you will be analyzing. Discuss why you made this choice. Explain whatever feelings or expectations you have regarding people who comprise this group. You can include a paragraph with a brief summary of the novel.
Your essay must have a thesis statement. Divide your essay into the following three sections: Introduction, Discussion, and Conclusion. Your introduction may be more than one paragraph in length. Most important, I should finish reading your introduction with a good sense of the scope of the essay as well as the path you will take toward proving your thesis. Remember one idea to one paragraph and remember to write transition paragraphs. (see SCC website for help on writing essays)
Your paper should be well organized. Think about the content, logically organize your analysis, and preview your main points of the body in the introduction.
In the body of your essay you should integrate at least 5 or 6 anthropological terms or concepts from the text and class discussions. Merely dropping a term or concept in a sentence does not constitute integration and analysis. You must exhibit that you understand the term or concept by defining/explaining it and offering a concrete example to support your observations and evaluations.
Questions to help you think about how culture is used in the novel:
• What struck you as strange, memorable and extraordinary?
• Did an image, sentence, scene, paragraph, dialogue between characters linger in your mind for a long time?
• Is there an example of a dialogue that you feel is central to the novel and helps the reader understand the culture being depicted? Tell why the dialogue is so significant.
• What confused you? What aspects of the culture seem different and difficult to understand from your point of view? Maybe you were surprised to see a character act in a certain way or maybe you did not understand why the book ended the way it did. Ask yourself why the author chooses to write about a character or a scene the way he/she did and you might tap into some important insights about the novel. How did the novel affect you? Why?
• Did the novel cause you to alter or change your ways of thinking about the subject matter?
Once you know what question(s) you want to answer (see above) it is time to collect material; look for evidence in the book that will help you formulate your response to the question (s) you selected and that will support your thesis statement. It is usually helpful to write a provisional thesis statement once you start your reading. Do not worry if you do not have a clear idea of exactly what you are going to write about. After you have selected the question(s) you want to answer, it is useful to make a list of the things you think you should know in order to answer your questions. Note taking is an invaluable help when preparing your essay. Annotate your text (if the book is yours) by writing in the margins or keep a separate notebook or pad for your reading notes.
What to look for as you read:
Pattern: Did you notice an underlining image, relationship characterization, phrase and/or belief and/or behavior/and/or depiction of characters and so on that is repeated throughout the novel? Can you figure out how the pattern weaves through the entire novel and its significance? Keep in mind that the pattern will be rooted in culture.
Characters: The people who act and are acted upon—their personality i.e., particular qualities the author assigns them as persons or their “persona”. Here again you will find that culture is a factor. Expect to find “personality” a different configuration of qualities than you would expect to find in your own culture.
Conflict: The central tension(s) in the novel. In most cases the protagonist (main) character(s) wants something while opposing forces (antagonist) hinders the protagonist(s) progress. Culture comes into play in what the conflict is about. Be careful not to attribute “conflict” to “human nature” for culture shapes conflict and makes it distinct. For example, father and sons in all cultures experience conflict but what the conflict is about, the interplay of the authority of the father and the obedience of the son, what is considered “normal” conflict and how the conflict is resolved is shaped by culture.
Setting: When and where the novel takes place. Elements of setting include location, time, period, and weather, social, political, historical and economic conditions. At a micro level, every “act” and “activities” have settings configured by culture. For example, family dinners, living quarters, parties and marriage ceremonies all have settings shaped by culture. Even if the setting seems “western”, keep in mind that it is a hybrid arrangement because it is not a ceremony indigenous to the native culture. Nor does a “western” aspect of culture reflect the superiority of “western culture”. It may reflect a legacy of colonialism.
Themes: The main idea(s) of the work—usually an abstract idea(s) about people, society, life in general—embedded in the novel. Themes may be contradictory and many themes may be in tension and/or conflict with one another. Themes are not obvious but something intuitive and since you are reading about a culture different from your own, themes may seem confusing to you.
Elements of Style: These are the “how” of the story—how the characters speak to others, how language is used throughout the text, how the story is constructed. Is the structure of the story different from what you may expect? Culture shapes how the story unfolds.
Structure and Organization: How parts of the novel are assembled. Some novels are narrated in linear chronological order while others may skip from present to past. Or, it may be the case the novel is structured by the life story of one individual. Some authors leave gaps for the reader to figure out the missing information. A novel’s structure and organization can tell you a lot about the kind of message it wants to convey. Since American culture emphasizes the individual, you will tend to focus on an individual. To do so minimizes the importance of the community and the community’s relationship to the individual.
Point of View: Point of view is the perspective from which a story is told. In first person point of views, the narrator is part of the story. In the third person point of view, the narrator doesn’t participate in the story but closely follows a specific character recounting the individual character’s thoughts and experiences.
You essay should end with a conclusion. Summarize your main points and briefly discuss what you have learned about the culture.
Be creative with your essays. These will be posted on the blog, so you may include images, video, etc.
Anthropological Novels
Africa
• Return to Laughter: An Anthropological Novel
Elenore Smith Bowen
A vivid and dramatic account of the experiences of an American anthropologist who lived with a primitive bush tribe in Africa.
• Cry, the Beloved Country
Alan Paton
A Zulu country parson arrives in Johannesburg and finds that his sister has become a prostitute and his son a murderer.
• Half of a Yellow Moon
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Based loosely on political events in nineteen-sixties Nigeria, this novel focusses on two wealthy Igbo sisters, Olanna and Kainene, who drift apart as the newly independent nation struggles to remain unified.
• Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe
Rendering of Nigerian tribal life before and after the coming of colonialism.
• Nervous Conditions
Tsitsi Dangarembga
A novel of colonization and its effects focuses on the coming-of-age story of Tamba, a teenage girl living in Rhodesia, whose relationship with her British-educated cousin will cause her to question the constraints of her life in the village.
• July’s People
Nadine Gordimer
When South Africa is riven by war and the Smales, a white couple, take refuge in the village of their former servant July, their relationships are completely transformed.
American Indian
• Tracks
Louise Erdrich
Set in North Dakota at a time in this century when Indian tribes were struggling to keep what little remained of their lands.
• Love Medicine
Louise Erdrich
The members of the Chippewa Kaspaw and Lamartine families describe their simple existence as they both deny and discover their native heritages.
• A Thief of Time
Tony Hillerman
Chilling discoveries unearthed at a dig for Navajo clay pots bring Lt. Joe Leaphorn and Officer Jim Chee to the site and put them on the trail of stolen artifacts, a disappearing woman, and bizarre and mystifying murders.
• Skinwalkers
Tony Hillerman
Along with the attempted murder of Officer Jim Chee of the Navajo Tribal Police, Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn uncovers three unsolved homicides that may be linked to witchcraft buried deep within the Navajo culture.
• Song of the River
Sue Harrison
A historical novel on the Aleut people, who inhabited prehistoric Alaska. The hero is Chakliux, a trader of hunting dogs who becomes embroiled in tribal intrigues, leading to murder and the massacre of dogs. Lots of detail on the Aleut way of life.
• The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian
Sherman Alexie
Budding cartoonist Junior leaves his troubled school on the Spokane Indian Reservation to attend an all-white farm town school where the only other Indian is the school mascot.
• Blackening Song
Aimee Thurlo
Ella Clah, a tough Navajo FBI agent, must combine modern investigative techniques with traditional Native American mystical beliefs to solve a murder on the Navajo Indian Reservation in Shiprock, New Mexico
African American
• Beloved
Toni Morrison
After the Civil War ends, Sethe longingly recalls the two-year-old daughter whom she killed when threatened with recapture after escaping from slavery 18 years before.
• A Mercy
Toni Morrison
In exchange for a bad debt, an Anglo-Dutch trader takes on Florens, a young slave girl, who feels abandoned by her slave mother and who searches for love--first from an older servant woman at her master's new home, and then from a handsome free blacksmith, in a novel set in late seventeenth-century America.
• Their Eyes were Watching God
Zoral Neale Hurston
The novel follows Janie Crawford, an articulate African-American woman in the 1930s, on a quest for identity, through three marriages, on a journey to her roots.
• The Color Purple
Alice Walker
Two African American sisters, one a missionary in Africa and the other a child-wife living in the South, support each other through their correspondence, beginning in the 1920s.
• The Help
Kathryn Stockett
Limited and persecuted by racial divides in 1962 Jackson, Mississippi, three women, including an African-American maid, her sassy and chronically unemployed friend, and a recently graduated white woman, team up for a clandestine project.
Chile
• The House of the Spirits
Isabel Allende
The Trueba family embodies strong feelings from the beginning of the 20th century through the assassination of Allende in 1973.
China
• Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet
Jamie Ford
When artifacts from Japanese families sent to internment camps during World War II are uncovered during renovations at a Seattle hotel, Henry Lee embarks on a quest that leads to memories of growing up Chinese in a city rife with anti-Japanese sentiment.
Cuba
• The Aguero Sisters
Cristina Garcia
Explores the complexities of Cuban American family life in the story of two middle-aged Cuban sisters--one living in Havana, one in New York City--who have been estranged for more than thirty years.
• Dreaming in Cuban
Cristina Garcia
While Celia del Pino supports Fidel Castro, her daughter Lourdes lives in New York and blames Castro for her rape by a revolutionary, and her daughter Pilar laughs at her way of fighting Communisim.
India
• The Tree Bride
Bharati Mukherjee
Struggling to reconcile with her estranged husband, Tara Chatterjee relates the story of an East Bengali ancestor who married a tree at the age of five and who grew up to be a nationalist freedom fighter against the British Raj.
• Nectar in a Sieve
Kamala Markandaya
This novel tells the story of India and its people through the eyes of one woman and her experiences in one peasant family in a primitive Indian village.
• A Passage to India
E. M. Forster
Two women come to Chandrapore, India, and their lack of understanding of the culture causes one of them to make an unjust accusation.
• The Tiger Ladies: A Memoir of Kashmir
Kudha Koul
The author, born a Kashmiri Brahmin in 1947, recounts stories from her grandmother and mother of the days before Pakistan and India were partitioned and Kashmir became disputed territory between them.
• The White Tiger
Aravind Adiga
A brutal view of India's class struggles is cunningly presented in Adiga's debut about a racist, homicidal chauffer. Balram Halwai is from the “Darkness,” born where India's downtrodden and unlucky are destined to rot. Balram manages to escape his village and move to Delhi after being hired as a driver for a rich landlord. Telling his story in retrospect, the novel is a piecemeal correspondence from Balram to the premier of China, who is expected to visit India and whom Balram believes could learn a lesson or two about India's entrepreneurial underbelly.
Indonesia
• This Earth of Mankind
Pramoedya Ananta Toer
Minke, a Javanese native, breaks with his family and seeks to rise in the Dutch colonial system, but his meeting with a family of mixed heritage changes his ideas.
Haiti
• Breathe, Eyes, Memory
Edwidge Danticat
A young Haitian girl comes of age torn between two cultures--the Haiti of her Tante Atie and Grandmother Ife, and the New York of her mother Martine.
Science Fiction
• The Left Hand of Darkness
Ursula LeGuin
While on a mission to the planet Gethen, earthling Genly Ai is sent by leaders of the nation of Orgoreyn to a concentration camp from which the exiled prime minister of the nation of Karhide tries to rescue him.
• Dune
Frank Herbert
Set on the desert planet Arrakis, this is the story of the boy Paul Atreides, who would become the mysterious man known as Muad'Dib, avenge the traitorous plot against his noble family, and bring to fruition humankind's most ancient and unattainable dream.
