Literature Solved Assignment
Introduction
In IGNOU’s MA English program (MEG), the course MEG‑12: A Survey Course in 20th Century Canadian Literature is important in that it introduces students to the major voices, themes, and trends in Canadian literature from the twentieth century. To write your Term End Exam in the July 2025 – January 2026 cycle, it is essential to submit a well‑prepared assignment.
In this entry, you will be able to find:
- A summary of the MEG‑12 course and why it is important
- Pattern of assignments and types of questions
- Sample answers (in your own words) to assist you in structuring your answers
- Writing, formatting, and submission tips
- Do’s & don’ts and how to score well
Disclaimer: The sample answers given below are to assist you. Always write answers in your own words and modify them according to your own question paper version and question prompts.
What is MEG‑12
What is MEG‑12 about
The MEG‑12 course provides a sweeping overview of key authors, movements, and works in 20th century Canadian literature. It examines how Canada’s history, geography, multilingual and multicultural identity, colonial heritage, and changing modernism have influenced its literatures in poetry, fiction, drama, and criticism.
The course generally includes:
- Historical and cultural contexts (settler colonialism, indigenous voices, bilingualism, immigration)
- Principal poets (e.g. E. J. Pratt, P. K. Page, Margaret Atwood)
- Major novelists (e.g. Margaret Laurence, Mavis Gallant, Michael Ondaatje)
- Leading playwrights (e.g. George Ryga, Tomson Highway)
- Principal critics (e.g. Northrop Frye, Robert Kroetsch)
- Principal themes: identity, nature / landscape, memory, exile, language, marginality, gender, and postcolonial issues
- The transition from modernist to postmodern and postcolonial sensibilities
By reading MEG‑12, you not only learn about Canadian literature, but also about broader debates of cultural identity, language, and modernism.
Why MEG‑12 is important in IGNOU’s MA English
- It opens your eyes to literatures beyond Anglophone and Indian.
- It sharpens comparative, critical, and contextual reading abilities.
- The assignment component of MEG‑12 is 30% weightage in your final mark (as in most IGNOU courses).
A good assignment can contribute significantly towards your overall performance in the subject.
Assignment Pattern & Question Breakdown
The MEG‑12 assignment will usually have 10 questions, each with 10 marks (i.e., total 100 marks). You need to answer all questions. Each answer should be approximately 500 words (give or take) unless otherwise indicated.
Sample questions (from previous cycles) are:
- What are some dominant concerns that characterize 20th century Canadian Literature?
- Canadian Professional Theatre provided the Canadians with their own identity. Do you concur?
- “The landscape of Canada instills dread in the literary imagination.” Do you concur?
- Comment on the central ethos of Canadian poetry.
- What are the dominant themes occurring in the novel Surfacing?
- Describe the representation of everyday people and their fundamental humanity in The Tin Flute.
- Draw the character sketch of Kip in The English Patient.
- “Rita is a victim of social injustice.” Support this statement based on the play The Ecstasy of Rita Joe.
- Account for the Indian immigrant’s experience in Canada in “Swimming Lessons” and “The Door I Shut Behind Me”.
- Evaluate the contribution of Robert Kroetsch to postmodern criticism in Canada.
(The following list is taken from available solved assignment sources.
Double-check your actual question paper (since IGNOU sometimes makes changes or updates minor wordings) before you write.
Sample / Model Answers (Sketches)
The following are recommended outlines/model answers that you can elaborate upon in your own words. Refer to them as a guide to frame your essays, not to reproduce word for word.
1. What are the main issues that dominate 20th century Canadian Literature?
Outline / Key points:
- Cultural identity and nationalism: The quest for a unique Canadian voice outside the shadow of British colonialism. Authors grappled with creating a national identity distinct from British and American paradigms.
- Nature, landscape, and environment: Canada’s expansive geography (forests, cold weather, wilderness) determines a pervasive theme — the land as both nurturing and intimidating.
- Multiculturalism, immigration, and hybridity: Canada as immigrant nation, conflicts of old and new languages, retention of cultures, assimilation, and diaspora.
- Language, bilingualism, and translation: English-French vs French-English cultural realms, Aboriginal languages, and translation as bridge and also as barrier.
- Postcolonial and Indigenous discourse: Recent 20th century features voice of Aboriginal writers and criticism of colonial inheritance and settler dislocation.
- Trauma, memory, exile: Historical traumas (war, displacement) and the conflict of migration, roots, and alienation.
- Gender, feminism, marginal voices: Such writers as Margaret Atwood center gender, power, and marginality in Canadian culture.
- Modernism to Postmodernism: Fragmentation, multiple narrative viewpoints, and metafiction.
- Social issues: class, inequality, urbanization: Urban vs. rural environments; social justice, poverty, regional disparity.
Brief example paragraph (you would expand):
Canadian authors in the 20th century struggled intensely with the question: What does it mean to be Canadian? Unlike countries with centuries of unbroken literary heritage, Canada struggled to define its own identity in the shadow of British colonial tradition and the massive literary influence of its gigantic neighbour, the United States. This tension pushed authors to contend with land, native history, bilingualism, and immigrant narratives as means to establish a distinctive national literature.
2. Canadian professional theatre provided the Canadians with an identity of their own. Do you agree?
Outline / Key points:
- Historical context of Canadian theatre: Early Canadian theatre was shaped by British traditions; professional theatre companies (e.g. Stratford Festival) developed gradually.
- Development of local plays, playwrights and themes: Canadian theatre came to dramatize local stories, Canadian history, myths, and social issues (identity, multiculturalism, bilingualism).
- Festivals and institutional support: Provincial and national funding, theatre festivals, and institutions (e.g. Stratford, Shaw, Centenary) supported Canadian drama.
- Canadian representation in drama: George Ryga, Michel Tremblay, Tomson Highway, Judith Thompson’s plays give unique Canadian voices and enable Canadians to experience their own stories.
- Duality of language and culture: French-English bilingual drama, translation, intercultural performances establish dualities.
- Metropolitan vs national theatre: Canadian theatre needed to avoid being simply imitation of American or British. Local stories received validity through circuits of professional theatre.
Sketch answer:
I concur that Canadian professional theatre was important to establishing a national identity. Theatre, as a communal art form, provided Canadians with a unifying cultural platform upon which Canadian stories, terrain, and tensions could be staged and seen by local audiences. As professional theatre developed, Canadian playwrights transcended importation of British or American playtexts, opting instead to stage issues based in Canada: bilingualism, native-settler relations, immigrant dislocation, and regional identities. And gradually, Canadian theatre became a mirror in which Canadians could recognize themselves, thus serving to define and assert a distinctive Canadian cultural identity.
3. “The landscape of Canada inspires terror in the literary mindscape.” Do you agree? Give a reasoned answer.
Outline / Key ideas:
- The landscape of Canada is huge, desolate, extreme (winter, wilderness).
- In literature, the natural world is not just background—it tends to be pressuring, isolating, threatening.
- Examples: Robert Kroetsch, Margaret Atwood, Hugh MacLennan, etc.
- The sublime and uncanny: nature as sublime terror, oppositional to human will.
- Wilderness fiction, frontier symbolism, alienation.
- But counterpoint: nature as home or shelter, healing.
Sketch answer:
Yes, to a significant degree the Canadian literary imagination is one of landscape not as benevolent setting but as an agency capable of inspiring terror, awe, and psychological destabilization. The immense forests, bitter winters, storms, and isolation generate conditions of isolation and existential exposure. In Surfacing, to take one example, the heroine is brought back to wilderness which disturbs her memories and psyche. The landscape, far from being merely a background, becomes an active force in constituting human consciousness. But one must also recognize that most Canadian authors represent nature as solace, home, or productive energy — so the “terror” is one aspect, not the entirety of landscape representation.
4. Reflect on the core spirit of Canadian poetry.
Outline / Key points:
- Land, nature, seasons, environment affiliation
- Identity, memory, hybridity issues
- Form and linguistic experimentation
- Translated and bilingual poetries (French / English)
- Modernist heritage, rhythmic severity, imagery sparseness
- Poets: E. J. Pratt, P. K. Page, Irving Layton, Milton Acorn, Margaret Atwood, Anne Carson, Michael Ondaatje (poetic output)
- Poetic engagement with indigenous and minority voices
Sketch answer:
The core essence of Canadian poetry tends to be in the meeting of self and terrain, between memory and dislocation, and between polyphony of voices. Canadian poets tend to employ a guarded, watchful voice, responsive to the nuances of nature and quiet. There is a focus on location — land, weather, seasons — not as romantic background but as part of the psyche. Concurrently, Canadian poetry thematizes identity, language hybridity, marginality, and cultural negotiation. The mood is one of restraint, irony, introspection, and address to multiplicity rather than bravado. Voices over time opened to women, immigrants, aboriginal poets, and experimental form, building a more pluralistic poetic culture.
5. What are the principal themes coursing through the novel Surfacing?
Outline / Key themes:
- Alienation, identity, and self-discovery
- The past, trauma, and memory
- Wilderness and nature
- Power relations, gender
- Political critique (nationalism, Quebec separatism)
- Language, voice, silence
- Fragmentation, psychological interior
Sketch answer:
Surfacing, written by Margaret Atwood, is a psychologically intense novel where the narrator (Anna) travels to her childhood house in Quebec in search of her missing father. Some of the main themes are:
- Alienation and identity: Anna is alienated from her past and from the world, the struggle to create an identity within the wilderness.
- Memory and trauma: Repressed memories materialize. Past love, guilt, and loss come back around.
- Nature and wilderness: The Canadian wilderness mirrors her inner journey — healing but also dangerous.
- Power, control, and gender: Anna’s relationships — with her husband, lovers, and male peers — reveal power conflicts and gendered controls.
- Political/cultural tensions: The novel refers to cultural tensions in Quebec (French-English tensions) and nationalism.
- Voice, silence, and language: Silence and lack of language characterize trauma; Anna struggles to give voice to her internal self.
Therefore Surfacing interweaves psychological, ecological, and political strands to explore what it is to reclaim, remember, and recover one’s identity.
6. Describe the presentation of everyday citizens and their humanity in The Tin Flute
Outline / Key points:
- Gabrielle Roy’s The Tin Flute (La petite patrie) is an example from working-class Montreal (St. Henri)
- Concentration on everyday struggles, poverty, dreams, family relationships, resilience
- Characters: Florentine, Emmanuel, Azarias, Desneiges — ordinary lives, moral decisions
- Dignity, sympathy, humaneness in the face of adversity
- Social realism and local color
Sketch answer:
In The Tin Flute, Gabrielle Roy voices the everyday, illustrating how ordinary life is rich with moral and emotional significance. The novel is about the Gouin family and their neighbors in a humble quarter of Montreal and describes their battles with poverty, disease, family conflicts, and aspirations. Roy depicts her characters sympathetically — their generosity, obstinacy, weaknesses — and demonstrates their “essential humanity.” In unfavorable circumstances, emotional connections, hope, comradeship, and dignity emerge. By subtle psychological nuance and provincial specificity, Roy lifts the mundane to the universal, reminding us that the lives of “ordinary” people are worthy of literary life.
7. Map the character outline of Kip in The English Patient
Outline / major points:
- The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje: Kip is an Indian Sikh sapper (bomb disposal expert) during World War II
- Background: from India, educated half in Canada/England
- Technical skill, discipline, precision — work with bombs
- Cultural dislocation: between colonizer and colonized, tensions around identity
- Loyalty, love, control of emotions
- His relationship with Hana and the English patient and the narrative trajectories
- Transformation and turning point: leaving after the atomic bomb
Sketch answer:
Kip in The English Patient is a rich, nuanced character who is both strong and vulnerable. As a Sikh sapper serving in Italy during World War II, he is brave, competent, and selfless, disarming bombs in hostile landscapes. But beneath the technological mastery is a man brokering identity: colonial subject, soldier, immigrant, lover. Kip’s cultural dislocation rears its head in his relationship with Hana, his perceptions of war, and his responses to being summoned by the imperial war machine. Following the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, his belief in Western progress shatters, and he retreats. His path highlights colonial, racial, and personal breakdowns of mid‑20th century existence.
8. “Rita is a victim of social injustice.” Support this assertion with reference to the play The Ecstasy of Rita Joe.
Outline / key points:
- The Ecstasy of Rita Joe by George Ryga
- Rita, a First Nations woman, comes to the city in pursuit of a better life
- Alienation, racism, poverty, bureaucratic abandonment
- Exploited by social systems (housing, welfare, policing)
- Systemic prejudice destroys Rita’s dreams
- Allegorical aspect of the play: Rita as marginalized other
Sketch answer:
Rita in The Ecstasy of Rita Joe is unequivocally a victim of social injustice. As an Indigenous female migrant to urban Vancouver in search of dignity and opportunity, she is confronted by discrimination, indifference, exploitation, and poverty. The systems designed to serve citizens — welfare agencies, law enforcement, housing authorities — fail her or turn them into tools for oppression. She is marginalized based on her ethnicity, gender, and poor status. Ryga’s play employs Rita’s tragic journey to condemn a society that proclaims equality but enforces exclusion. Her joy is ironically a desire for belongingness and justice to which the social order refuses her access.
9. Explain the Indian immigrant experience in Canada in “Swimming Lessons” and “The Door I Shut Behind Me”
Outline / Key points / themes:
- Both are short stories / poems / prose pieces written by Indian diaspora writers
- “Swimming Lessons” (by Meera Nair? or Margaret Mahy? – refer to context of author) addresses issues of assimilation, dislocation, invisibility
- “The Door I Shut Behind Me” also addresses departure from homeland, emotional turmoil, adjustment
- Themes: homesickness, identity crisis, alienation, cultural duality, memory
- Past/present contrast, immigrant’s viewpoint
Sketch answer:
In “Swimming Lessons” and “The Door I Shut Behind Me,” Indian immigrant voices chart the difficult landscape of migration — the push-pull between home and host, loss and adaptation. In “Swimming Lessons,” the immigrant must learn cultural mores in the new world, to adapt and often drown in invisibility or assimilation stress. In “The Door I Shut Behind Me,” leaving itself becomes figurative — closing behind the house one had, behind identity, memory, connection. The immigrant experience is one of ambivalence: nostalgia for home, but struggling to negotiate a fragile new belonging. The host country may provide promise, but frequently brings with it cultural effacement, identity disintegration, and emotional rending.
10. Evaluate the contribution of Robert Kroetsch to postmodern criticism in Canada
Outline / key points:
- Robert Kroetsch: novelist, poet, critic; major figure in Canadian postmodernism
- His major works: The Studhorse Man, The Words of My Roaring, Seed Catalogue, etc.
- Theme of “writing the land”, dismantling narrative, metafiction
- Criticism of Canadian nationalism and quest for identity
- Focus on fragmentation, intertextuality, playful form
- His critical writings and essays: impact on Canadian literary theory
Sketch answer:
Robert Kroetsch is arguably one of the most creative minds in Canadian postmodern literature and criticism. His writing disrupts universal narratives of nation, history, and identity, instead opting for fragmentation, hybridity, and the interaction of land and text. In such books as The Words of My Roaring and The Studhorse Man, Kroetsch dabbles in nonlinear form, metafiction, and multivocality. Kroetsch’s critique focuses on how writing is geographical, situated in land, memory, and temporality. Kroetsch’s theories affected generations of scholars and writers in Canada who expanded the limits of how Canada’s literary identity could be theorized postmodernly.
Writing Your Assignment: Tips on Format, Style, Strategy
1. Read the question carefully & plan
- Underline key terms (e.g., “Discuss,” “Evaluate,” “Trace”)
- Break down the question into sub-parts
- Spend 5–10 minutes outlining before writing
2. Use introduction-body-conclusion structure
- Introduction: define terms, set context, state your thesis (your answer).
- Body: organize into 3–5 thematic paragraphs, with headings or subheadings (if allowed).
- Use examples, quotations (sparingly), and textual references.
- Conclusion: restate your arguments and include a last comment or observation.
3. Word limit & clarity
- Keep to ~500 words per question (unless IGNOU otherwise directs)
- Do not be redundant or wordy
- Employ simple, clear language — clarity is everything
4. Use study materials and references
- Check IGNOU blocks / units for major theorists, quotes, background
- Apply critics and articles (but always in your own words)
- Don’t overuse internet sources — your response should mirror course content
5. Presentation is important
- Legible handwriting, margins and page numbers
- Title each question (Q1, Q2…) and sub-parts
- Leave a bit of a gap between paragraphs
- Number pages, use a cover page for assignment
6. Time & ordering
- Allow time per question (e.g. ~25–30 minutes)
- Begin with questions you are most confident about
Leave 5 minutes at end to proofread
Submission Guide & Important Dates
- July session assignments usually due 31st March; January session, by 30th September (always check with your study centre, though).
- In handwritten form (typed might not be accepted).
- On your cover page, make sure it contains: name, enrolment number, program code, course code MEG‑12, session, study centre, email/phone.
- Hand in at your study centre or regional centre. Get a receipt or acknowledgement.
- Retain a photocopy / scanned copy for yourself.
- Late submissions may be rejected or penalized — don’t procrastinate.
(These are general guidelines in line with IGNOU assignment conventions.
Do’s, Don’ts & Common Mistakes
✅ Do’s
- Write in your own words — novelty, clarity, and authenticity count
- Use headings, bullets, numbered lists where useful
- Make answers balanced — not overemphasize a single point
- Give textual evidence/examples — names, titles, quotations
- Control language and grammar — simple, mistake-free sentences
- Check your question paper version every cycle
❌ Don’ts
- Do not copy from solved guides or online sources directly (plagiarism is an offence)
- Do not go above or below the word limit significantly
- Avoid making unsubstantiated general statements
- Do not overlook sub-parts of the question
Don’t omit reading or proofreading at the end
How to Use This Article / Sample Answers Effectively
- Read your actual assignment questions — they may slightly differ
- Use these models as frameworks, not as scripts to copy
- Develop each point with supporting details from your study blocks
- Make it personalized with your understanding, examples, and critical insight
5. Attempt writing a complete answer in draft, and then match with the model and sharpen
Why It Matters to Submit a Good Assignment (particularly for MEG‑12)
- Assignment counts for 30% of your final grade in most IGNOU courses.
- A good assignment can make up for mediocre performance in the term exam.
- It shows your critical thinking, writing ability, and mastery of the topic.
- It’s a prerequisite requirement to be able to sit in the term-end exam — failure to submit might be blocking your result.
- It enables you to study the texts intensely instead of skimming them.
AcademicVox frequently posts solved assignments and advice to enable IGNOU students to perform well. (See their assignment / weightage guides). ([academicvox.com][3])
Final Thoughts & Encouragement
Working on the MEG-12 assignment might seem intimidating in its scope and its significance. But with careful planning, thoughtfulness, and routine practice of writing, you can deliver top-notch responses. Use the illustrative outlines below as scaffolding — but don’t rely on them dogmatically. Make your voice your own, stay connected to your syllabus, and care about coherence and critical depth.