Carter's Circuitous CIRCUS

read "London" and "Petersburg" up to Chapter Four (p. 125). Pick two of the following questions: answer one for Mon. (due Sunday) and the other for Wed. (due Tues.).

• Carter's book constantly plays on the theme of reality vs. artifice. This theme is relevant to the question of the story's fictive reality and also germane to images of femininity. Find a passage in which these issues are present and analyze the passage, showing how Carter's style exploits the ambiguity between the real and illusory.
• Carter's style, like Amis's, is quite "fancy" - but in a different way. Carter employs what I would call "delicate malapropisms" - words that don't quite make sense in the context she uses them. These "misused" words actually add complexity to her writing, expanding the range of possible interpretations. Find a passage in which she uses language in this way and analyze its effect.
• Both Amis's humor and Carter's employ humorous juxtapositions. In other words, there is often a certain distance between the way characters represent themselves and the way we perceive them. Find a humorous passage from Money and another from Nights at the Circus: compare/contrast the apparent function of humor in each case. What is the author getting across through humor?
• This is really three questions in one. Crash, Money, and Nights have many themes in common. In each novel, there is an awareness of our relationship to consumerism and the culture of products; in each case there is a comment on our relationship to our own bodies; in each case there is a comment on our identity as affected or altered by technology.  Pick one of these themes and discuss how it is treated in each novel, specifying at least one passage from each work.
• Like Amis, Carter is a well-bred writer in the sense that her work is rich in historical and literary allusions. Write about an allusion that occurs more than once in Nights. Comment on how this echo plays into the seeming thematic concerns of the book.
• Like Amis, Carter plays on a juxtaposition between high art and cheap commercialism. While in Money this juxtaposition occurs in the context of a depiction of masculine experience, in Nights it may well be a comment on femininity as experienced or seen from the outside. Contast the art/money theme in the two books.