social business convention write a 1200 word essay in response to one of the topi

Write a 1200 word essay in response to one of the topics below. This assessment task assesses your skills in close reading and the analysis of representations of the everyday/ordinary. Ensure that you read the Marking Criteria (see below) carefully.
In addition to drawing on relevant ideas from the readings by Lefebvre, Felski, Highmore and/or Woolf (her essays), your analysis must draw on at least one secondary reading that discusses the primary text that forms the focus of your discussion (e.g. a critical reading on the photography of Helen Levitt, To the Lighthouse, or A Christmas Memory).

TOPICS:
1. Discuss the interplay between ideas of the ordinary and extraordinary in this photograph by Helen Levitt. Consider issues such as composition, subject matter, salience, setting and so on.

(A larger version of the photograph can be viewed in the Assessment folder)

2. Talking about the weather might be a literary and social convention that Virginia Woolf critiques in her essay Character in Fiction (Essays 3, 434), but in the opening sections of To the Lighthouse she uses the weather as a vehicle for portraying character and establishing complex family relationships in the novel. Focusing on relevant passages from sections 1 to 3 of Part 1, The Window, write an essay that explores and supports this statement.

3. The following passage from To the Lighthouse describes the scene at the beach when Minta discovers that she has lost her grandmothers brooch:

It was not until they had climbed right up on to the top of the cliff again that Minta cried out that she had lost her grandmothers brooch

[to]

But, good heavens, he said to himself, putting his hand to his tie, I must not make a fool of myself (Part 1, section 14, pp. 63-65 of the prescribed edition – full excerpt is in the Assessment folder in vUWS).
Helen Levitt, New York, c1940. Estate of Helen Levitt

Through a close reading of this passage, discuss the significance of this micro-event and how it relates to broader themes in the novel. Possible themes you might want to discuss in your response include gender relations, marriage, objects, loss or impermanence.

4. In his essay The Everyday and Everydayness, Lefebvre argues that in the modern era (i.e. through modernity) our relationship to objects has become instrumental (functional) and materialistic (p. 8). Through a close reading of A Christmas Memory, discuss how Capotes story challenges Lefebvres assessment of our relationship to objects and things in the modern era.

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