Literature from Canada

Warrior Woman Nancy Chang

SETTING: Toronto, citiy being modernised. Chinese culture was changing, Canada was
changing. Changes are inexorable, growing is inexorable.

POV: 1st person singular (Girl)

CHARACTERS:

mother gossipy, narrow-minded, traditional, submissive, invisible. She's the center in

the girl's life. The act of applying make-up is a ceremony. Her position in society is reflected
in her not having a name in the story, she has a nameless entity (Chinese culture)

girl innocent, naive, inquisitive. In the search of finding a mirror to find her identity:
in her mother, in warrior woman.

warrior woman fearless, strong, independent. Character from the film. Red lips,
glowing cheeks, painted eyes and soaring eyebrows emphasized her powdered white face. (p. 23)

Mother and warrior woman they share a dialect but not the view of the world

REPRESENTATIONS:
1. old culture mother
2. new culture warrior woman
3. transition girl (she finds a new mirror, a new perspective), her identity
is nearer to warrior woman, not her mother.

MIRROR shows another face of the character, who is reflecting where.

Red Dress Alice Munnro

POV: 1st person singular (Girl)
CHARACTERS:

mother enthusiastic, protective. She was trying to make her daughter look
younger.

girl rejected, shy, insecure. Teenager (13). She did the impossible not to attend
the dance because nobody liked her. She wanted to be a child again, not a
teenager. She wanted to look older when attending the dance. She had no father.
Her clothes were made by her mother. At the end she enjoys being a teenager,

she wanted to be liked by boys, she wanted to be a part of that world. PASSAGE:
she's slowly becoming a woman.

Lonnie friend of the girl. She had no mother (MIRROR). She had ready-made
clothes.

Mason Williams boy who

takes her out to dance, reluctantly. The girls feels humiliated and mistreated.

Mary Fortune MIRROR. Free, independant. She had her life planned. Instead of
feeling bad about her situation which was the same as the girl's, she decided to
change. The girl tries to copy Mary.

Raymond Bolting he takes the girl out for a dance. Nobody had told him to, he
just asked her.

MIRROR a girl without a father and a girl with a father. Not so different situations.

Lives of the Poets Margaret Atwood

POV: 1st person singular (Julia feelings)
3 rd person singular (Omniscent character narrator, doesn't know anything about
Julia's feelings or thoughts). We can infer, but we do not know for sure.

SUBTEXT what's not written, what we deduce.

TEXT what's written.
CHARACTERS:

Julia poet. 28 years old. Promising writer. She's interesting but not payed
much money. She's depressed and neglecting herself, she felt as if she had no
future.

Bernie Julia's partner. He had a gallery which he had because Julia had lent
him money. He was taking advantage of Julia. He's selfish and immature.

Marika Bernie's secretary. She's beautiful and always nice. Julia is afraid that
Marika's having an affair with Bernie.

HOTEL old, shabby, dirty, sticky, hot, oppressive, reflects Julia's feelings.
BATHROOM Julia's nose bleeds from the beginning of the story to the end. Her
thoughts and feelings are in between.

MIRROR there is NO mirror to look up to.

Literature from Africa

Robert and the dog Ken

Saro Wiwa

POV: 3rd person singular (Omniscent)

Simple English language
Deep story

CHARACTERS:

Robert steward of a doctor. He was in charge of the house. His family lived in
the Ajegunle (The Jungle). He had a wife and six children. He was the authority at
his house. After being weel treated by his masters, Robert starts feeling like a
human being again. He thought the dog was more important than him. He saw
that the dog was doing better than him. He did not understand why the dog had
everything and he had nothing. WHO BORN DOG?

Bingo The employer and the wife's dog. He's the source of worry of Robert. He
was well fed with tinned food and milk, he had meat and bones. He was loving
towards Robert.

Robert's employer young doctor. Cheerful, exhuberant, polite, kind to Robert.

The employer's wife young, cheerful, European, interested in Robert's

background and traditions, she was considerate of Robert and his family. She
wanted to visit Robert and his family.

CONFLICT: the dog is taken to the doctor and Robert feels his stomach turn because
his children had nothing to eat, were in the filth and ate awful food. Bingo becomes Robert's
object of hatred. Roberts leaves the dog to die and takes the dog food to his family.

COMPLEXITY: who's right and who's wrong in the story? There's no way out,
everybody suffers. It is not clear who's the goodie or the baddie in this story. There's not right
nor wrong.

Head above water

Buchi Emecheta

SETTING: Africa in the 21st century

POV: 1st person singular (Florence)
CHARACTERS:

Florence black girl from an African tribe. Shy, sensitive, wears glasses, too
serious looking, not particulary clean nor clever. She went to a private school
and had a scholarship which made her feel both guilty and grateful. She used
the English language to express the elements of her own culture and she
could recite Shakespeare. She wanted to become a writer. She played both
roles: bush girl and civilized Christian. She felt both at the same time. She
adapted to the New World to study. Thanks to the education she was given
she had the possibility to choose. (She bridges the gap).

Tribe represent the bush culture and the tradition. Whenever Florence
went back for a visit, they reminded her about her origins. They were proud
of themselves and very hopeful. Florence had tribal marks on her face and
she had a clitorization when she was eight years old (a practice to have
sexual self control as a young adult)

Miss Humble literature teacher, she did not like Florence because she did
not believe that she should be able to express what she thought in English.

Parents they had a scant education. They were innocents in the so-called
civilized world (Florence was born there) and in their own civilized world
they were communal, caring and supportive. They were sophisticated. They
had left everything (their village homes of their ancestors) to find the NEW
THING.

THEMES Tradition and civilization. Florence realizes that after being inmersed
in this new culture, the West Culture, she can now be treated differently, that she has the
ability to choose for herself.

ENDING Florence crosses a bridge from the bush culture to her school
education. She assimilated and not abandoned neither of them. She bridges the gap; she
chooses, she's able to think.

ESCAPE Florence lived for stories. She dreamed all the stories she heard while in
Ibuza. She loved literature and stories. She did not feel sorry for having said her dream of
becoming a writer aloud.

Astonishing the Gods

Ben Okri

POV: 3rd person omniscent

PROBLEM: the boy's invisible, he wants knowledge, he's trying to become visible,

to find the secret of visibility, to find people whi DID exist to see how they looked like.

CROSS THE BRIDGE: he has to choose to cross the bridge or not. (This is what
happens to us every day with daily events and happenings)

ELEMENTS: Bridge parallel, invisibility.

SYMBOLS:
mirror (he was invisible) a mirror reflects one's identity, if he had no
reflection...maybe that was his identity.

chessboard bravery in making decisions, intellectual quest after identity

(intellect and sensations)

unicorn imagination, dreams, power, fertility, death

colours representation of the bridge
rainbow bridge between earth and heaven
number seven seven days of Creation, seven hills, seven colours of the
rainbow.

moonlight sensations
INTERTEXT whether to cross the bridge or not is a question of FAITH. Related
to Hamlet: to cross or not to cross? Is better to try and fail than not do it.

LEAP OF FAITH: crossing the bridge

Literature from South Africa

Make him sing J M Coetzee
POV: 3rd person omniscent
SETTING: South Africa during the Apartheid.
There is no racial tension in the story.

CHARACTERS:

white boy he's always first in class, he doesn't share his things with his
mother, his life at school is a secret, he's neat, knows the answers and always
does his homework.. He does not want to be beaten but not having been
beaten makes him squirm with shame because education was punishment. He
saw it as unnatural and shameful that he was not beaten in his family, that

people were addressed by their first names and that he wore shoes every day.
He says to himself that he will be able to endure the pain.

boys at school get flogged with a cane. They weighed up the characters of
the canes and quality of the pain.

Ray Roe oldest boy in class, tall and handsome in a devil-may-care way. He
never cried when beaten with a cane which made the teachers angry.

teachers beat the students with a cane.

cane personified in the title Make him sing beat someone as hard as
you can. Each cane was different depending on the owner: some were short,
other thick, other stubby. Students were allowed to joke with teachers about
their canes.

Miss Oosthuizen excitable woman, hennaed hair, never married, loved

beating Ray Roe.

Mr Britz woodwork teacher, little man, close-cropped hair, has a

moustache. He has the most fearsome cane which he is rumored to use on
older boys which made them blubber and plead for mercy.

mother overprotective

Country Lovers Nadine Gordimer

POV: 3rd person omniscent
CHARACTERS:

Paulus Eysendyck white man, fancies Thebedi. On Christmas holidays he

gives her a painted box. When they were fifteen he gave her a red plastic belt
and gilt hoop-ear-rings. Thebedi says the missus gave them to her.
At the trial there is no proof the baby was his, so he's not guilty of having
killed her.

Thebedi black girl, she was a farm child living in Kraal. On Christmas
holidays she gives Paulus a bracelet made with brass wire and grey-andwhite beans. She and Paulus told stories to each other and in his presence,
she wore her shoes. They spent night together and she left before the
servants arrived. They had a love story behind the back of everyone.
When she goes to trial, she accuses Paulus of having poisoned the baby. A
year layer, wearing the earrings Paulus had given her when teenagers, she
says she did not know if he had poisoned the baby or not, she said she had

lied. There's no proof of her involvement in the crime.

Njabulo black man from the tribe who asks Thebedi's father for her. A
wedding is arranged.

Baby Paulus is the father, Njabulo takes the baby girl in. When Paulus finds
out about the baby he goes to see Thebedi. You haven't been near the house
with it? You must give it to someone. The baby then has diarrhoea and
dies the next day. Njabulo buries her and soon after, the police take away the
corpse. An autopsy is made and they find out that she had intestinal
damaged, she had been poisoned.