Doris Lessing- The diaries of Jane Somers

1.Identify the general feminist issues addressed in the excerpt. Is a Victorian novel,
told from the Janes point of view. She is telling us about the dinner, describing the
environment, she is complaining about the lights I was thinking widly, If all the
lights were switched off, what then? she cant forget his dead husband, pretends
she is in love with Richard, and when he wants to leave she let him go.
2.Discover their particular instantiations and comment on them. A womans eye
on life as a feature that makes the novel feminist. She is always thinking about her
husband, thats why she cant have a normal relationship with somebody else It
goes without saying that I dreamed of Freddie, my lost love. Who was never my
love. , the fact that she is letting Richard go means that she is insecure, she
doesent know what she wants and I couldnt wait for him to leave.
3. Find the female stereotypes alluded to and discuss their reception. She is
obsessed with the lights, with the cleaning after Richard left, meanwhile she is free
to dance, she is feeling empty without Freddie, his image is trapped in her head.
4. Develop on sexuality and meta symbolism. And he said, just as I thought it If
the lights were off, Janna but who would we be making love with I wonder? she
anticipated his thoughts, its a novel of ideas, characters stands for notions and
principles.
5. What are the barriers inferred and to what extent are they overcome inside the
text and outside it? Freddie is a barrier between her and other men, environment
reminds her of Freddie, even the painting, Picasso.
6. Concentrate on the man-woman relationship and underline the deviations from
the accepted/acceptable patters. Then he said. Im going. I shouldnt have come.
Yes, you must. And I couldnt wait for him to leave [] Their relationship its
an impossible one, because Richard is married, and Janna cant decide to bring it to
an end. She pretends to be in love with Richard, but all that she does is relieve her
past with Freddie.

7. Discuss the narrative technique employed to forward the text. First person,
intimate subject.
8. How much does the diary form contribute to facilitating introspection? The
whole story is told from Jannas point of view. Rewriting the self into a diary
becoming open to introspection.
9. Observe the deliberate textualization of the self and discuss it in relation with the
contemporary situation.
10. Point to the juxtaposition of temporal levels and the demarcation between the
real and the fictional(ised). The present of the writing is the recent past narrating.

Fay Weldon- Down among the women

1.Discuss the impact that the title as refrain has upon the reader. Emphasis the idea
of the novel, the idea of women exploited by men in domestic circumstances,
womens oppression and the low status they have.
Men look down on women and put some of them in difficult positions, and it
emphasize the idea , image and makes them stronger.
2. Mention the ideas overtly expressed and the ones barely suggested. Women gets
in different types of relationships, they are unhappy. Are presented three
generations of women.
Unhappy, powerless etc.
3. Refer to the oblique criticism addressed to patriarchal society. Patriarchy must
be fought back and freedom of action and thought allowed to dictate the evolution
of women in society.

Women should be ladies- Wanda turned into a man , she is old

4. Immasculation of discourse.
5. Which are the female stereotypes brought to attention and how is each
perceived? On good afternoons I take children to the park. I sit on a wooden
bench while they play on the swings, Audrey who abandoned her children on
moral grounds, and now lives with a married man in more comfort and happiness,
Sylvia too ran off with a married man
6. Are man associated with money? If so, why? Because they work and women are
staying home taking care of kids.
7. What is the importance of time in the presentation of womanhood? They
younger you are more cotated you become.
8. How is the text narrated and by whom? Wanda is the one who opens the novel,
and Byzantia her follower ends it. The narration is achieved by the handling of
both a third person omniscient narrator and a first person objective one. Shifts from
1st person to 3rd person.
9. What purpose do the brackets in the text serve? To know which one is talking.
10. Why do you think the urban setting was chosen? To underline that the man has
the same role as in country side, the woman should stay at home to look after the
kids. Women are in chase of happiness but they cant find it, the plot is selected to
illustrate the argument about women today and always. They are presented from
childhood to maturity and old age, are presented as suffering from gender
inequalities related to economic conditions.
Helen Fielding- Bridget Joness diary

1.What impact does the statistics which opens the entry have upon the reader? She
wrote everything, wants to start next day a healthy life. Is trying hard to change
herself so as to match the expectations of a male.
2.What unconventional practices and techniques are carefully made us use of in the
fragment? Her words, her behavior towards other people. She is frustrated. She
yells. Fielding makes the direct intimate diary serve a twofold purpose: of accesing
an honest presentation of a woman and the feminine psychology and behaviour.
3. What is the function of the dialogue?
4. Consider the freedom of inhibition provided by the girls night out and discuss it
in feminist terms. They gossip, confess to each other Jude was depressed because
Vile Richard keeps ringing her Sharon was in top form. She was already yelling
by 8.35, pouring three quarters of a glass of Kir Royale straight down her throat.
They drinking too much. She is drinking too much.
5.Analyse the quality of the language. She is full of frustration, she is complaining
too much, is drinking too much. Bridget Jones is worried about putting on weight,
or not being able to give up smoking and not being able to find a good man.
6. Diachronic presentation
7. What insecurities are satirized and how were they born in the first place? Fear of
people in general, about her weight, she is unstable, she thinks about herself that is
unlucky. She is incapable of communicating with others. Her writings are the only
consolations she has for the daily. She prefer to drink, to smoke, to eat as a cure for
the blandness of being.
8. Compare what is openly expressed to what which remains silenced in
connection with accepted impositions. The novel considers the difficulty of
communcication verbal or textual, of finding common ground on which men and
women might feel at home in.

9. What kind of comic is predominant and how is it achieved?

Situational and

language comic.
10. What is the general human condition alluded to? She does everything to gain
the long desired boy friend. Critical of the cosmopolitan cover girl.

Salman Rushdie- Midnights children

1. What central postcolonial issues are addressed in the text above? You are
an Anglo-Indian? Your name is not your own?
The classical debate on the equality of races. He can`t identify himself because
he is of Anglo-Indian origin; the novel is written in English, the language of the
other: ayah= nurse/governess.
2. Develop on hybridity: manifestations and perceptions.
Anglo-Indian language reference to the smirk comparison between Little Sonny
and William Methwold- once India gained the Independence he had left.
3. Discuss the central paradox of the excerpt: being fathered by history and
rewritten by fiction.
Synecdochly born within that historical context.
4. Consider the metafictional aspect: the dialogue between the narrator/author and
the narratee/reader. Salem is the main character also the narrator which discuses
with Padma the narratee. Salem adopts the stance and voice of the author while
Padma stands for an inquisitive, dissatisfied reader who keeps complaining about
the meaningless of the narrative. Your name is not your own? she is interested in
what he writes and she does not accept lies.

5. How many diegetic levels may be observed? The Frame story, the embedded
story of SS beginning 3 days after my birth, the story told by news paper.
6. How does structure contribute to forwarding content? Very complicated
structure access to content or not?
7. Analyze the magic realism of the fragment.
8. Focus on the role of the media in catching the moment.
Media is associated with truth, but at the same time manipulation.
9. Which personal and national histories are developed upon and to what purpose?
Saleem history and colonial and post-colonial India.
10. Observe the multitude of Is and eyes holding the text together and reread it
from this perspective. Different people.
I different persons in terms of the I, different cultures etc.

Kazuo Ishiguro- The remains of the day

1. What is Englishness defined in terms of and why?
We English have an important advantage over foreigners in this respect and it is
for this reason that when you think of a great butler, he is bound, almost by
definition, to be an Englishman.
Englishness is defined as: dignity, emotional, restraint etc.
The I person narrator it is always capitalized in English and that reflects the
cultural believe that the individual is important, essential, holds the text together in
comparison to other countries that are called Continentals (are unable to control
themselves) and the Celts

The Englishmen gave their own names to parts of the world. He is proud that they
are butlers. (Irony)
They think that the Continentals are a poor race the supremacy of the English
race, although we talk about the butler of a traitor.
It is sometimes said that butlers only truly exists in England. Other countries,
whatever title is actually used, have only manservants. Continentals are unable to
be butlers because they are to be butlers.
2. (Re) writing of the national and personal self as obvious in the excerpt.
The rewriting takes place in the lines of the supremacy of the English race the
tiger will not eat him, an Englishman.
3. Vocabulary, diction most of the excerpts, a series of thoughts of Mr. S. are
Latinate (in formal register, academic- to decapitate, regard, discard,
circumstance), not German (that is associated in informal situations- beheaded).
The discourse is very sophisticated but the speaker is a butler; he is like a parrot
that copies others` vocabulary and that means that it is a discrepancy between what
he sais and what happens irony language is not enough to make a person.
4. Point to the subversive practices and techniques employed. Builds the film of
Steven's life in retrospect.
The author makes a character speak in the name of English and look down on
anybody else (it`s a post colonial idea that is subversive), and even if he speaks
pompously he is still a servant.
English people don`t want anybody to come to them, they don`t want foreigners
(but they are from post-colonials, are part from the same nation, political issue).
5. What tropes are predominant and what roles do they play? In text are tropes like:
dignity, butler. Their role helps us to understand another significance of their,

because we know that a butler is a man who: get us the food, drinks and in text his
importance is amplified.
6. Disambiguate the I, the you and the we in the text. I= Mr. S ; We=all butlersmetonymical for the English, the English as a butler nation, You/ the other=reader,
the Japanese.
The I person narrator it is always capitalized in English and that reflects the
cultural believe that the individual is important, essential, holds the text together in
comparison to other countries that are called Continentals and the Celts
7. The freedom of choice he`s postulating things: Englishmen are great and the
others no. He does not gives him a choice, he`s a butler from a long way of butlers
and he is proud and does not question that.
8. Seriousness/irony.
We may now understand better, too, why my father was so fond of the story of
the butler who failed to panic on discovering a tiger under the dining table. They
wear their professionalism as a decent gentleman will wear his suit: he will not let
ruffians or circumstances tear it off him in the public gaze; he will discard it when
and only when he wills to do so and this will invariably be when he is entirely
alone.
He is very serious but the text is formulated such way that he makes you laugh
anyway.
9. The Celts
10. The world we and the others
Otherness superior.