Our Spotlight series offers a range of possible ideas for your next major assignment -- IOP/FOA, WT, EE etc... If you need more help developing or refining your ideas, contact us.
ExemplarsIOC sample commentary
"A lushly-written work, offering an intriguing mix of fact and fiction and a panoply of different voices and perspectives."
IOP /FOA
- Presentation: A close discussion/analysis of Ondaatje's style, using by way of illustration one or more extracts from the book.
- Presentation: Exploration of a theme - EX: The Vulnerability of History to Time and Perspective - Throughout Running in the Family, this theme is evident, especially in chapters, "Tropical Gossip" and "Lunch Conversation".
- Discussion: A number of motifs run through the memoir - for example, insects, maps, and cinnamon. You could discuss any of these as a class, using a number of illustrative extracts and
getting classmates to decide on purpose and effect of each motif.
- Exploration of a symbol: The Tea Estate. In the chapter, “Tea Country”, the magnitude of the tea fields surrounding the old Ondaatje family is used to emphasize the sense of isolation D seems to feel when living there. The vast expanse of these fields, although tranquil, creates a sense of imprisonment with its uniformity and silence.
- Exploration of a motif: Identity. In earlier chapters, the idea of identity revolves around the identity of Ceylon, but later Ondaatje’s own identity is more in focus. In one chapter he seems to question his connection with his family and his own role in the scheme of things. He draws upon the feeling of wanting to meet his father and to discuss the past with him to reveal that he is trying to develop a greater understanding of his father and is perhaps in need of a guide.
- Presentation / Radio book-club interview: Ondaatje once famously said: ”A literary work is a communal act. [...] I must confess that the book is not a history but a portrait or ‘gesture’. [...] In Sri Lanka a well-told lie is worth a thousand facts.” Discuss. This can be best done as a presentation or an animated book interview or roundtable in the same style as BBC4 In Our Time or CBC
- Presentation / interview: Discuss the use and significance of magic realism in this work.
- Other motifs worth investigating: maps, nature and money
WT1
- An obvious — indeed excellent — idea for a WT1 is pastiche. Write in the style of of Ondaatje (point of view, tone, syntax, diction, register, narrative interplay) drawing on your own multicultural self. If you are from a primarily monocultural/lingual background you can also rewrite a passage from a totally different work, substituting Ondaatje’s written style for the original.
- A radio interview (CBC Writers & Company, BBC World Book Club, CBC Ideas or ABC The HUB on Books, The Guardian podcast) where Ondaatje discusses with the host the relation between memory and identity, or his book's contribution to post-colonial literature, or his purpose for writing the book.
- One or more diary entries by a character / person in the memoir, reflecting on the significance of an event.
- Choose any dramatic episode or incident in the work and rework it into a tabloid article
- Book review. Models for book reviews are TLS, Atlantic, London Review of Books, NPR, Guardian Books.
WT2
Q. 5: "How does the text conform to, or deviate from, the conventions of a particular genre, and for what purpose?"
Is it autobiography? novel? memoir? fictionalised history? This work is classified as memoir, and yet in many respects it plays with the conventions of this text-type.
As a post modern work Ondaatje’s Running in the Family includes the use of pastiche (multiple genres and styles), intertextuality (acknowledgement and use of other literary works); metafiction (writing about writing, and the self-conscious presence of the writer); nonlinear narrative; ironic and humorous tone (even treating difficult subjects from a position of dislocation and humor); and magical realism (fantastical elements incorporated into realism, and treated as part of reality).
Q. 3 "How and why is a social group represented in a particular way?”
Focus on how the native inhabitants of Ceylon are portrayed. Alternatively, you could focus on how the European colonizers are described in this multilayered memoir.
Q.6 “How has the text borrowed from other texts, and with what effects?” Here again, the question applies itself very nicely to this work. Some borrowings include D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and Shakespeare. Ask one of our tutors to help you get started on this question.
EE
"To what extent can Running in the Family be called a postmodern work?" The post-modern idea of the fractured narrative and the impossibility of obtaining an objective truth is evident in both the “Bone” and “Dialogue” sections where we are given stories from different perspectives.
"For what purpose and to what effect does Ondaatje use magical realism in Running in the Family?"...
OR
"In what ways and to what purposes is magical realism used in Running in the Family and in X (work in translation, for example: Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude)?" (Lang A: cat.2 EE)
OR
"In what ways and to what purposes is magical realism used in Running in the Family and in X (work in translation, for example: Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude)?" (Lang A: cat.2 EE)
- Investigate
- Inspiration for a similar EE topic: Memory, Identity and Empire.
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