Sample Assignment 5

Brian Page
220:12 Principles of Literary Study
Fall 2001

Paper 3 - Season of Migration to the North
5 - 7 pages, Due Monday, November 26, 2001
Number your pages, either with software, or by hand if needed.

Building upon the critical tools we've been using in the course, examine some specific aspect of Season of Migration to the North using the concept of imaginative geographies. In what ways is this part of the fictional world of Season divided into zones or regions? What principles of discrimination (ideological, geographical, economic, cultural, racial, etc.) determine the designation of boundaries, the definition of difference? What discourses circulate in this part of Season? How easily do they cross its boundaries to leave one zone and enter another? To what degree and in what ways do zones that initially appear to be demarcated and opposed turn out to resemble and in some sense "produce" each other? In other words, how or in what ways do the subjects in one zone imagine and produce the subjects and territories of other zones? The territories you examine could be restricted to the national, regional, institutional, familial, and especially the subjective territory of the mind as represented in a particular episode or a few passages of the novel. You should focus on specific sentences from Said as well as from Season of Migration to the North in your analysis in an effort to produce as close a reading of them as possible.

Some of the questions you might address include the following: The narrator tells of his horror that he might be like Mustafa Sa'eed. To what extent does Mustafa Sa'eed exist in all of us; are we all lies? That is, what does the character of Mustafa Sa'eed and the narrator's thoughts about him reveal about the concept of the self in light of the tools from the course packet we've been working with? Can one detect a degree of "phobic fascination" with what is repudiated as "low" or "other" in the discourse? How do the cultural practices of certain zones or societies mark or shape the way a character chooses to live in the part of Season you've chosen to examine? How does Foucault's discussion of "societies of promiscuity" help to reveal the way that the zones in Season establish prohibitions or restrict different modes of being? Sa'eed's migration seems to be born from "the germ of this infection," "the pangs of wanderlust" (65-7). In what ways does his fundamental dislocation inform the discourse he employs and, so, the style of this modern novel as a whole? Mona Amyuni says that the soul of Salih as an "artist is constantly nurtured and safegaurded by his father, or in other words, by his deep rootedness to a specific place and belonging to a specific people". How might this apply to Effendi, the narrator of Season in relation to Sa'eed? Does the novel move from event to event, or does it unfold like a discourse, repeating its terms, flowing over itself like a river, and looking for residency in various societies in the caravan of life? How do the different genres that Salih experiments with help illuminate this? By now you should be able to think up other questions related to material from the course packet that you may want to investigate, so you should feel free to do so - and to answer them -as your paper develops.