1c) The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression that took place mostly

during the 1930s, beginning in the United States. The timing of the Great Depression varied across
nations; in most countries it started in 1929 and lasted until the late-1930s. [1]It was the longest,
deepest, and most widespread depression of the 20th century. [2] In the 21st century, the Great
Depression is commonly used as an example of how intensely the world's economy can decline.The
Great Depression started in the United States after a major fall in stock prices that began around
September 4, 1929, and became worldwide news with the stock market crash of October 29, 1929,
(known as Black Tuesday). Between 1929 and 1932, worldwide gross domestic product (GDP) fell by
an estimated 15%. By comparison, worldwide GDP fell by less than 1% from 2008 to 2009 during
the Great Recession.[4] Some economies started to recover by the mid-1930s. However, in many
countries the negative effects of the Great Depression lasted until the beginning of World War II.[5]
The Great Depression had devastating effects in countries both rich and poor. Personal income, tax
revenue, profits and prices dropped, while international trade plunged by more than 50%.
Unemployment in the U.S. rose to 25% and in some countries rose as high as 33%.Cities around the
world were hit hard, especially those dependent on heavy industry. Construction was virtually halted
in many countries. Farming communities and rural areas suffered as crop prices fell by about 60%. [7][8]
[9]
Facing plummeting demand with few alternative sources of jobs, areas dependent on primary sector
industries such as mining and logging suffered the most

1b) The Floating Opera is a novel by American writer John Barth, first published in 1956 and
significantly revised in 1967. Barth's first published work, the existentialist and nihilist story is a first-
person account of a day protagonist Todd Andrews contemplated suicide.Critics and Barth himself
often pair The Floating Opera with Barth's next novel, The End of the Road (1958); both were written
in 1955, and are available together in a one-volume edition. Both are philosophical novels; The End of
the Road continues with the conclusions made about absolute values by the protagonist of The
Floating Opera, and takes these ideas "to the end of the road". Barth wrote both novels in a realistic
mode, in contrast to Barth's better-known metafictional, fabulist, and postmodern works from the
1960s and later, such as Lost in the Funhouse (1968) and LETTERS (1979).

1d) The Color Purple is an epistolary novel i.e. it is written as a series of documents, the usual form is
letters. This technique allows Celie to speak for herself; she also gets to structure her identity and her
sense of self by writing her letters. Celie’s letters, her growing ability to express her thoughts point out
to her spiritual development and also pave the way for her independence. The novel’s narrative
technique is linked with the novel’s main thematic image of gaining an identity, of rebirth and of
survival. Through the form, Walker also links a formal and western tradition to an oral and distinctly
African American folk expression. The use of the vernacular infuses an old form with new life. Alice
Walker uses the color purple which is a color of triumph, regal power. By using this color, Walker has
rendered heroism to their lives and to their ability to survive and triumph over oppressions and
hardships.The novel faced criticism by the Afro Americans because of the unfavourable portrayal of
men as being capable of oppressing other members of the community especially women. Young
women are treated like sexual objects; Celie is raped by her ‘Pa’. Her education is discontinued forcibly
against her wish; she is married off to a person because she has become a “burden”. At the start of the
novel, her only voice is her letters to God. In ‘The Bluest Eye’ Pecola is completely silenced as a result
of paternal violence, Celie does not resign her beauty to a world where blue eyes seem to be the white
standard of beauty. Celie confides in to God about her sufferings and not to any imaginary friend, she
refuses to be a voiceless victim.

1g) The Jazz Age was a period in the 1920s and 1930s in which jazz music and dance styles rapidly
gained nationwide popularity in the United States. The Jazz Age's cultural repercussions were
primarily felt in the United States, the birthplace of jazz. Originating in New Orleans as a fusion of
African and European music, jazz played a significant part in wider cultural changes in this period, and
its influence on pop culture continued long afterward. The Jazz Age is often referred to in conjunction
with the Roaring Twenties, and in the United States it overlapped in significant cross-cultural ways
with the Prohibition Era. The movement was largely affected by the introduction of radios nationwide.
During this time, the Jazz Age was intertwined with the developing cultures of young people, women,
and African Americans. The movement also helped start the beginning of the European Jazz
movement. American author F. Scott Fitzgerald is widely credited with coining the term, first using it
in his 1922 short story collection titled Tales of the Jazz Age.Jazz is a music genre that originated in the
African-American communities of New Orleans, United States,[2] in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, and developed from roots in blues and ragtime.[3] New Orleans provided a great opportunity
for the development of jazz because it was a port city with many cultures and beliefs intertwined.
[4]
While in New Orleans, jazz was influenced by Creole music, ragtime, and blues. Jazz is seen by many
as "America's classical music".[6] In the beginning of the 20th century, dixieland jazz developed as an
early form of jazz.[7]. In the 1920s, jazz became recognized as a major form of musical expression. It
then emerged in the form of independent traditional and popular musical styles, all linked by the
common bonds of African-American and European-American musical parentage with a performance
orientation.[8] From Africa, jazz got its rhythm, "blues", and traditions of playing or singing in one's
own expressive way. From Europe, jazz got its harmony and instruments. Both used improvisation,
which became a large part of jazz.[9] Louis Armstrong brought the improvisational solo to the forefront
of a piece.[10] Jazz is generally characterized by swing and blue notes, call and response
vocals, polyrhythms and improvisation.

2b) Theodore Dreiser’s novel Sister Carrie is an example of a naturalist text because it integrates the
ideas behind the American literary realism movement, particularly in terms of precise descriptions
and rational observations, yet also contains elements that make the reader understand that characters
are simply the products of environment and outside influences. It should also be stated that the urban
landscape marks a departure from traditional realists texts and this urban “sea" of humanity forms the
basis for the actions of both the protagonist as well as her society as a whole. Capitalism in “Sister
Carrie” by Dreiser and the desire to consume is the driving force and desire becomes more important
that genuine sentiment. In this novel, characters change in class status and are constantly at risk of
being lost in the sea of the urban landscape. These elements define Sister Carrie and the naturalist
movement as a whole.Although Sister Carrie is a text with groundings in the conventions of realism,
there is an interesting shift towards naturalism. This shift is most visible when the narrator gives the
reader insights into characters and it becomes clear that they are creatures not only of the natural
world, but also of the environment. More specifically, this environment is one of capitalism, of urban
landscapes, and class differences. It is no longer feasible for Dreiser, to depict the world as the merely
as the realists before him did, he obviously recognizes the forces of the marketplace that not only
shape existence, but also in fact create it. One of the most visible differences between the world
depicted by the writers of realist texts and that of Dreiser is that he is keenly aware of urbanization
and views the city as a sort of new natural landscape to set his characters in.
For example, in one of the most important quotes from Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser, the narrator
states, “We see man far removed from the lairs of the jungles, his innate instincts dulled by too near an
approach to freewill, his freewill not sufficiently developed to replace his instincts and afford him
perfect guidance. He is becoming too wise to hearken always to instincts and desires; he is still too
weak to always prevail against them" . It is no longer appropriate for Dreiser to rely strictly on the
conventions of realism. Instead, in this, one of the important quotes from “Sister Carrie” by Theodore
Dreiser he has to take it one step further and speak of freewill and desire. Here, freewill and desire are
not matters of nature or feeling, but are rather symptoms of the environment. It is this emphasis on
characters being shaped by their surroundings that defines this text as a naturalist versus realist text.
The distinction is subtle and at times the lines between the two are dulled, but it clear that the focus is
not necessarily how the individual responds in a natural way to surroundings, but more so how the
environment shapes perception and even reality. It should be noted that Carrie is moved along with
the tide through a short series of relationships, none of them lasting, everything always changing. It is
almost against her will, but if one views the sea image as the “tide of capitalism" then it is clear she is
merely following the promise of material comfort and not love. It is thus also remarkable that Sister
Carrie, despite its frequent scenes featuring lovers, is hardly a love story. It is rather a tale about the
loss of innocence and the giving up of one’s mind to the powerful sea of capitalist forces and selfish
desires.Money and capital are responsible for the actions of humans rather than the more “pure"
forces that regulated the lives of characters in realist texts. Consider, for example, the idea presented
by the narrator that, as stated in one of the meaningful quotations from “Sister Carrie” by Theodore
Dreiser, “A man’s fortune or material progress is very much the same as his bodily growth. Either he is
growing stronger, healthier, wiser, as the youth approaching manhood, or he is growing weaker, older,
les incisive mentally, as the man approaching old age. There are no other states" (259). It could not be
put in a more concise way—clearly human nature is no longer molded by the forces of love, feeling, or
even rationality or reason. Instead of being shaped by nature and being able to describe characters
with microscopic precision, this becomes unnecessary when the reader knows the motivation. A man
is shaped by capitalism, the need to consume and all other impulses become secondary.Metaphorically
speaking, whereas realist text might have tended to focus on the jungle, Sister Carrie, as an example of
naturalism, concentrates on the sea. In other words, the jungle for the realist novel would represent
man in his primitive state, acting on natural desires and impulses that were generally the result of
emotion or other “pure" persuasion. The jungle represents man as an individual, man surviving in a
world that might not be suited to his best intentions. With realism, every detail could be described
with perfect accuracy, everything reasoned out and the character would be inclined to act according to
a sort of internal reasoning. With Sister Carrie, however, the sea is the object of interest. In this case,
the sea represents the sea of people that crowd together in urban areas. Unlike the jungle, this is a
massive place where one could lose the way or become drowned quite easily. In the sea, one must
stand out because there are so many other fish swimming, mostly with the current, in an effort to
shine. While this might be a dramatic and slightly abstract concept, put quite simply, the difference
between the jungle and the sea is that the desires are quite different. In the jungle, it is an individual
struggle close to the natural world. In the sea, however, there is simply the struggle to stay afloat and
not get lost. To bring this idea back into context, it is striking …

3b) Faulkner's style in this novel is not the typical Faulknerian style. Usually, his style has a complexity
and an involved sentence structure. But essentially, he uses a more straightforward narrative style
here. But the main stylistic achievement lies in Faulkner's ability to capture the essential qualities of
his characters through his style. He changes or modulates his style according to the character of
subject matter about which he is writing.Thus, the chapters handling Lena Grove are presented in the
simplest prose and in rather straightforward narration. This type of style blends with Lena's
personality, since she is seen as an uncomplex person with one single aim. Faulkner employs a lot of
dialect in narrating Lena's section and this use of dialect seems to capture the earthy nature of Lena
Grove.But with Hightower the style varies. There is no use of dialect in the Hightower sections.
Instead, in these chapters handling the Hightower narration and episodes, the style is the most
complex, and by Chapter 20, in which Hightower examines his past life, the style changes to one of
severe complexity and difficulty. This is because Hightower is going into a complex and difficult re-
examination of his past life.With Hightower, Faulkner also uses the technique of the "stream-of-
consciousness." This is a technique whereby the author writes as though he is inside the mind of the
characters. Since the ordinary person's mind jumps from one event to another, stream-of-
consciousness tries to capture this phenomenon. Thus Hightower, in re-examining his past life,
juxtaposes many events of the past into one timeless collection of events, and in his mind removes all
time barriers so as to see his life in one clear moment. This is a difficult task and Faulkner employed a
rather difficult and complex style in order to convey this difficulty.With Joe Christmas, Faulkner again
varied his style. In some of the transitional passages where Joe is in the process of returning back to
the past, the style is extremely complex. For example, before he returns to the episode in the
orphanage, the style is difficult: "Memory believes before knowing remembers. Believes longer than
recollects, longer than knowing even wonders. Knows remembers believes a corridor . . ."This
complexity then suggests the difficulty of returning to the past through the memory. But once this
transition back into the past is effected, the style becomes relatively simple. For example, the actual
narration of Joe's affair with Bobbie Allen presents no special difficulties.Thus part of Faulkner's
greatness lies in his style and the way he is able to adjust this style to fit the subject under narration.
The style will always shift in order to lend additional support to his subject matter.
4a) The Catcher in the Rye is set around the 1950s and is narrated by a young man named Holden
Caulfield. Holden is not specific about his location while he’s telling the story, but he makes it clear
that he is undergoing treatment in a mental hospital or sanatorium. The events he narrates take place
in the few days between the end of the fall school term and Christmas, when Holden is sixteen years
old.Holden’s story begins on the Saturday following the end of classes at the Pencey prep school in
Agerstown, Pennsylvania. Pencey is Holden’s fourth school; he has already failed out of three others. At
Pencey, he has failed four out of five of his classes and has received notice that he is being expelled, but
he is not scheduled to return home to Manhattan until Wednesday. He visits his elderly history teacher,
Spencer, to say goodbye, but when Spencer tries to reprimand him for his poor academic performance,
Holden becomes annoyed.Back in the dormitory, Holden is further irritated by his unhygienic
neighbor, Ackley, and by his own roommate, Stradlater. Stradlater spends the evening on a date with
Jane Gallagher, a girl whom Holden used to date and whom he still admires. During the course of the
evening, Holden grows increasingly nervous about Stradlater’s taking Jane out, and when Stradlater
returns, Holden questions him insistently about whether he tried to have sex with her. Stradlater
teases Holden, who flies into a rage and attacks Stradlater. Stradlater pins Holden down and bloodies
his nose. Holden decides that he’s had enough of Pencey and will go to Manhattan three days early,
stay in a hotel, and not tell his parents that he is back.On the train to New York, Holden meets the
mother of one of his fellow Pencey students. Though he thinks this student is a complete “bastard,” he
tells the woman made-up stories about how shy her son is and how well respected he is at school.
When he arrives at Penn Station, he goes into a phone booth and considers calling several people, but
for various reasons he decides against it. He gets in a cab and asks the cab driver where the ducks in
Central Park go when the lagoon freezes, but his question annoys the driver. Holden has the cab driver
take him to the Edmont Hotel, where he checks himself in.From his room at the Edmont, Holden can
see into the rooms of some of the guests in the opposite wing. He observes a man putting on silk
stockings, high heels, a bra, a corset, and an evening gown. He also sees a man and a woman in another
room taking turns spitting mouthfuls of their drinks into each other’s faces and laughing hysterically.
He interprets the couple’s behavior as a form of sexual play and is both upset and aroused by it. After
smoking a couple of cigarettes, he calls Faith Cavendish, a woman he has never met but whose number
he got from an acquaintance at Princeton. Holden thinks he remembers hearing that she used to be a
stripper, and he believes he can persuade her to have sex with him. He calls her, and though she is at
first annoyed to be called at such a late hour by a complete stranger, she eventually suggests that they
meet the next day. Holden doesn’t want to wait that long and winds up hanging up without arranging a
meeting.Holden sits alone at a table in Ernie’s and observes the other patrons with distaste. He runs
into Lillian Simmons, one of his older brother’s former girlfriends, who invites him to sit with her and
her date. Holden says he has to meet someone, leaves, and walks back to the Edmont.Maurice, the
elevator operator at the Edmont, offers to send a prostitute to Holden’s room for five dollars, and
Holden agrees. A young woman, identifying herself as “Sunny,” arrives at his door. She pulls off her
dress, but Holden starts to feel “peculiar” and tries to make conversation with her. He claims that he
recently underwent a spinal operation and isn’t sufficiently recovered to have sex with her, but he
offers to pay her anyway. She sits on his lap and talks dirty to him, but he insists on paying her five
dollars and showing her the door. Sunny returns with Maurice, who demands another five dollars from
Holden. When Holden refuses to pay, Maurice punches him in the stomach and leaves him on the floor,
while Sunny takes five dollars from his wallet. Holden goes to bed.He wakes up at ten o’clock on
Sunday and calls Sally Hayes, an attractive girl whom he has dated in the past. They arrange to meet
for a matinee showing of a Broadway play. He eats breakfast at a sandwich bar, where he converses
with two nuns about Romeo and Juliet. He gives the nuns ten dollars. He tries to telephone Jane
Gallagher, but her mother answers the phone, and he hangs up. He takes a cab to Central Park to look
for his younger sister, Phoebe, but she isn’t there. He helps one of Phoebe’s schoolmates tighten her
skate, and the girl tells him that Phoebe might be in the Museum of Natural History. Though he knows
that Phoebe’s class wouldn’t be at the museum on a Sunday, he goes there anyway, but when he gets
there he decides not to go in and instead takes a cab to the Biltmore Hotel to meet Sally.Holden and
Sally go to the play, and Holden is annoyed that Sally talks with a boy she knows from Andover
afterward. At Sally’s suggestion, they go to Radio City to ice skate. They both skate poorly and decide
to get a table instead. Holden tries to explain to Sally why he is unhappy at school, and actually urges
her to run away with him to Massachusetts or Vermont and live in a cabin. When she refuses, he calls
her a “pain in the ass” and laughs at her when she reacts angrily. She refuses to listen to his apologies
and leaves.Holden calls Jane again, but there is no answer. He calls Carl Luce, a young man who had
been Holden’s student advisor at the Whooton School and who is now a student at Columbia
University. Luce arranges to meet him for a drink after dinner, and Holden goes to a movie at Radio
City to kill time. Holden and Luce meet at the Wicker Bar in the Seton Hotel. At Whooton, Luce had
spoken frankly with some of the boys about sex, and Holden tries to draw him into a conversation
about it once more. Luce grows irritated by Holden’s juvenile remarks about homosexuals and about
Luce’s Chinese girlfriend, and he makes an excuse to leave early. Holden continues to drink Scotch and
listen to the pianist and singer.

5b)The Floating Opera is the first novel published by the American author John Barth. Although Barth
is much better known for the supernaturally inflected postmodernism of his later work, this 1956
novel uses a combination of realism and satire to describe the cynical and nihilistic world view of its
suicidal protagonist. The novel chronicles its narrator’s philosophical rejection of the idea of socially
upheld values. The Floating Opera was considered so bleak in manuscript that Barth had to change the
ending in order to get his work into print. However, the novel was reissued in 1967 with the original
ending restored.The main character is Todd Andrews, a 54-year-old man who is thinking back to the
day in June of 1937 when he decided not to go through with his suicide. In the present, Todd is an
attorney and has lived for decades in the same hotel. He is romantically involved in a meé nage-a-trois
which started when his lover Jane Mack and her husband Harrison, one of Todd’s close friends and a
client, decided to demonstrate how progressive and open-minded their marriage was by getting Jane
to sleep with Todd. Since then, Harrison has been less than ok with Jane and Todd’s relationship, but
the arrangement continues. Since the trio have been involved, Jane has had a daughter whose father
could be either of the men.Todd then flashes back to his past to describe some events that led him to
become the man he was on that crucial 1937 day. His Boston childhood is happy and uneventful. But at
17, Todd has an upsetting sexual experience with Betty and shortly afterwards enlists in the army to
fight in Germany during WWI. Traumatized by trench warfare and by killing a German soldier, Todd
learns that he has a heart condition that makes him liable to drop dead at any moment. After law
school, he spends some time as a hard-drinking bon vivant, until he again encounters Betty who has
become a prostitute. Sobering up, Todd returns home to Boston, only to find his father’s dead body –
his father has hanged himself after being bankrupted by the 1929 stock market crash, leaving Todd a
reasonably successful legal practice.This series of psychic wounds makes Todd into a complete cynic
who gives up on trying to adhere to the values and ideals of the society around him. This is the
mindset that starts his relationship with Jane and also ends up being a big plus in his career as a
lawyer. Todd is able to ingeniously win cases for his clients by finding loopholes and workarounds that
would have been invisible to someone without his nihilistic attitude. Todd is witty and happy to spar
verbally with the people around him, going so far as to trick his own clients for the pleasure of it. All of
this proves to Todd that there is no such thing as absolute values and that everything, including human
beliefs, is always malleable and shifting. He is never happy, and is always ruminating on the
irrationality of death, sex, his inability to know and understand his father, and a variety of other
human realities.Finally on that fateful June day, Todd realizes that the solution to his existential crisis
is to commit suicide, making the irrational death sentence of his faulty heart into a rational decision.
But his plan isn’t simply to kill himself. Instead, as the title of the novel reminds us, Todd decides to kill
699 other people at the same time as himself by blowing up a showboat called “The Floating Opera” in
the middle of a performance. To accomplish this he turns on several kerosene lamps and an acetylene
torch and then opens the gas burners on the ship stove. Now the show audience is in the same literal
and figurative boat as Todd – their death could come at any second, just like his.The acetylene fails to
explode and the boat is safe. Realizing this, Todd considers simply drowning himself instead, but then
his generally passive and nihilistic point-of-view saves him as he asks himself “why bother?” Returning
to his hotel, Todd finds a fellow resident, Mr. Haeker, about to die from a suicidal overdose of pills.
Instead of defaulting to his rational thought that the life and death of an individual don’t matter, Todd
calls for help and saves the Mr. Haecker.The novel’s thematic through line is Todd’s concept of a
floating show boat as an extended metaphor for his life. To Todd, the image of a ship pushed up and
down a waterway by the tide while people on the shore can only hear small snatches of the
performance on board is a good way to describe what life is like.The Floating Opera is a philosophical
novel in the existentialist genre – meaning that its main concerns are the problems of how to justify
and be ok with one’s existence. In order to complete his thinking on this subject, Barth followed it up
with The End of the Road, a companion novel on the same themes that is much more tragic and serious
in tone. Because of Barth’s eventual critically acclaimed career, these two novels tend be dismissed as
early novice works that do not shed much light on his actual talent.

6a) In the Exposition of The Color Purple, the relationship between Celie and Shug begins purely from
a picture. With this picture, Celie for the first time feels attraction and love towards another human
being other than Nettie. She can now refer to something as beautiful and this is a large stepping stone
from her emotionless state largely caused by the men in her life.In the Rising action, Celie also makes
out in her head what Shug is like as a person. When Shug and Celie first meet, Shug is nothing like
what Celie had made her out to be. Shugs first words that came out of her mouth were “you sure is
ugly” to Celie. Despite this, they get to know each other more and they grow closer to one another.
Celie opens up to Shug and Shug finds out the true nature of Mr.___ and Celie’s marriage. She sees how
Celie is really treated by Mr._____ and grows closer to Celie.In the Climax, Celie and Shug exhibit a
lesbian relationship. As can be seen with the two sucking on eachothers breast, they share a very close
relationship that is more than just sex. To Celie, her relationship with Shug is important because Shug
makes her feel important. She gives Celie a sense of identity and also makes her feel sexually,
physically, and emotionally more comfortable. Shug helps Celie get out of her emotionless state.
In the resolution of The Color Purple, Celies relationship with Shug seems to become strained. This is
not the case though. Although Shug has her eye on another man, Germaine, she still loves Celie.
Similarly, Celie loves Shug as much as she did before Germaine came along. There ability to love
eachother even after Shug is sexually involved with another person shows the extent of their love.
Celie although dreading Shug and Germaine’s relationship, cares enough for Shug to let her live a little.
• Symbol:motherhood, mentor
• Shug acts like a mother to Celie because she is the primary reason why Celie gains a sense of self
identity and importance in the book. Through Shugs, mentoring and love, Celie was able to grow into
an independent self thinking individual. Celie is now a stronger person because of Shug's influence.
Self Identity: "This song I'm bout to sing is call Miss Celie's song."(73) Shug gives Celie a sense of self
identity. She names her after a song.
Celie and Shug’s relationship is very significant because it helps Celie the weak, submissive girl grow
into the independent free thinking woman by the end of the book. The relationship Shug and Celie had
made Celie feel important. The relationship boosted Celie’s confidence, and empowered her to be that
independent woman.