Athol Fugard has spent much of his career as a playwright creating dramas that tell powerful stories about the lives of individual people, while at the same time criticizing South Africa's unjust system of apartheid. Read a Fugard play written before 1990, during the apartheid era, such as Master Harold . . . and the Boys or My Children! My Africa! How is Fugard's work from this time different from Valley Song, a play written for the "new" South Africa? How are the two plays similar? Consider such things as each play's setting, characters, and dominant themes.

In literature, a symbol is something that represents something else, and is often used to communicate deeper levels of meaning. In Nathaniel Hawthorne's famous novel The Scarlet Letter, for example, the red letter "A" worn by Hester Prynne is a symbol not only of her supposed crime (adultery), but...