Campbell Global Voices

Love in the Time of Cholera Take Home Essay Response

General Instructions
Please choose to respond to one of the following prompts, not all of them. Your cited use of
appropriate and clarifying support from the text will be essential for success.

Option A: Love and Cholera

In both his choice for a title and his recurrent juxtapositions within the story, how and why
does Marquez suggest a relationship between these two experiences? Tolstoy’s pairing of
“war” and “peace” and Dostoevsky’s of “crime” and “punishment” may seem more clear
and obvious than Marquez’s combination of the emotional and the physical, but our
experiences with Latin American poetry have probably prepared us for such an implied
metaphoric connection. Examples of their being paired or compared in the novel would be
the start of a good response, but you’ll need to address the appropriate and shared
connotations for those experiences to make the most thorough argument.
Tags: the pop song “(You give me) Fever,” Isabella Rossellini in Blue Velvet, std’s, thanatos
vs eros

Option B: Playing against expectations

Marquez seems to nod towards the classic or expected conventions of romance novels, but
then subverts or derails those conventions. To be clear, you’d want to establish a couple
examples of what you consider those conventions to be; don’t assume a universal
understanding or consensus. Why make the initial gesture toward the familiar only to
question expectations? Can Marquez honor a tradition or genre while also challenging its
limitations?
Tags: Post-modern, self-aware, improvisation on a theme

Option C: What Women Want

One of the distinct differences between this novel and earlier fictional romances is the
amount of power and freedom granted to the women. Not limited to the otherwise two-
dimensional roles of seductress or mother, Marquez’s women defy tradition to such an
extent that they appear to be historically misplaced, like an iPod in a Dickens novel. Why
has Marquez put the women in charge? Is our knowledge of women’s roles misinformed or is
Marquez rewriting history?
Tags: one of Sir Gawain’s quest, Freud’s question

Option DIY: Proposal due by 6pm, Sunday, 2/21

Construct a challenging prompt of your own around an idea, theme, image, etc. that you’ve
noticed in your own reading. Some possibilities:

– similarities between Florentino & Juvenal and possible reasons for them
– the recurrent power of smell; how and why is it linked to memory?
– definitions of love; how, after 622 sexual partners, can someone still be faithful?
– race, poverty, and war not content simply to provide “local color” for the setting
– expectation and reality; imagination and experience
– the passage of time; the experience of time passing
– the power or words, written and/or spoken