IB HL Literature

Areas of Exploration:

Readers, Writers, and text

This area introduces students to the nature of language and literature and its study. The investigation undertaken involves close attention to the details of texts in a variety of types and literary forms so that students learn about the choices made by creators and the ways in which meaning is communicated through words, image, and sound.

Study in this area should be structured to allow students to become more confident in their ability to recognize key textual and rhetorical features and how they create or affect meaning. Non-literary texts and literary works can be chosen that lend themselves to close reading and give students a sense of stylistic, rhetorical and literary elements across a variety of text types and literary forms.

The aim is not to enumerate or define various features and study will move beyond the identification of elements or the consideration of individual effects to see the complex constructed nature of texts. While conducting detailed study, learning activities can be structured to introduce students to the ways in which linguistic and literary professionals attend to communicative acts and their concerns. Student writing and response can involve moving between personal and academic response or between the creative and the expository.

Readers, writers and texts aims to introduce students to the skills and approaches required to closely examine texts as well as to introduce metacognitive awareness of the nature of the discipline by considering the following guiding conceptual questions:

​Why and how do we study language and literature?

• How are we affected by texts in various ways?

• In what ways is meaning constructed, negotiated, expressed and interpreted?

• How does language use vary amongst text types and amongst literary forms?

• How does the structure or style of a text affect meaning?

• How do texts offer insights and challenges?

Possible links to TOK:

Links to TOK in this area revolve around the question of what kind of knowledge can be constructed from a text, how that knowledge is constructed and the extent to which the meaning of a text can be considered to be fixed.

Examples of links to TOK include:

• What do we learn about through the study of a literary text? How is this different from what we learn through the study of a non-literary text?

• In what ways is the kind of knowledge we gain from the study of language and literature different from the kind we gain through the study of other disciplines?

• Can the study of language and of literature be considered scientific?

• How much of the knowledge we construct through reading a text is determined by authorial intention, by the reader’s cultural assumptions and by the purpose valued for a text in a community of readers?

• Are some interpretations of a text better than others? How are multiple interpretations best negotiated?

• ​In what ways do interpretive strategies vary when reading a literary work and when reading a non- literary text?

​Taken from Language A: language and literature guide

First assessment 2021

Areas of exploration:

Time and Space

This area of exploration focuses on the idea that language is a social capacity and as such is intertwined with community, culture and history. It explores the variety of cultural contexts in which texts are produced and read across time and space as well as the ways texts themselves reflect or refract the world at large. Students will examine how cultural conditions can affect language and how these conditions are a product of language. Students will also consider the ways culture and identity influence reception.

Students will investigate ways in which texts may represent, and be understood from, a variety of cultural and historical perspectives. Through this exploration students will recognize the role of relationships among text, self and other, and the ways in which the local and the global connect. These relationships are complex and dynamic. The background of an author and the make-up of an audience are not necessarily clear or easily described. Texts are situated in specific contexts and deal with or represent social, political and cultural concerns particular to a given time and place. For example, a text written to address the concerns of an author in contemporary society can be set in ancient times. Cultures that are geographically separated can share mores or ideas, while people living in proximity can embrace disparate traditions. Students will consider the intricacies of communication within such a complex societal framework and the implications that language and text take on when produced and read in shifting contexts.

Study and work selection in this area should allow students to explore texts and issues from a variety of places, cultures and/or times. The culture, biography of an author, historical events or narratives of critical reception will be considered and may be researched, but the focus of study will be on the ideas and issues raised by the texts themselves and a consideration of whether these are best understood in relation to an informed consideration of context. In this area of exploration, students examine the ways in which a text may illuminate some aspect of the political or social environment, or the ways in which a more nuanced understanding of events may affect their understanding or interpretation of a text. The study of contexts does not imply a static, one-to-one relationship between a text and the world, but sees the former as a powerful “non-human actor” across time and space.

Time and space aims to broaden student understanding of the open, plural, or cosmopolitan nature of texts ranging from advertisements to poems by considering the following guiding conceptual questions:

• How important is cultural or historical context to the production and reception of a text?​

• How do we approach texts from different times and cultures to our own?

• To what extent do texts offer insight into another culture?

• How does the meaning and impact of a text change over time?

• How do texts reflect, represent or form a part of cultural practices?

• How does language represent social distinctions and identities?

Possible links to TOK:

Links to TOK are related to the questions of how far the context of production of a text influences or informs its meaning and the extent to which the knowledge a reader can obtain from a text is determined by the context of reception. Examples of such links to TOK include:

​How far can a reader understand a text that was written in a context different from their own and which may have addressed a different audience?

• What is lost in translation from one language to another?

• How might the approaches to a given time and place of a poet, a cartoonist or a diary-writer and a historian differ?

• Is the notion of a canon helpful in the study and understanding of literature? How does a canon get established?

• What factors influence its expansion or change over time?

​Taken from Language A: language and literature guide

First assessment 2021

Areas of exploration:

Intertextuality

This area of exploration focuses on the concerns of intertextuality, or the connections between and among media, text and audience involving diverse traditions and ideas. It focuses on the comparative study of texts so that students may gain deeper appreciation of both unique characteristics of individual texts and complex systems of connection. Throughout the course, students will be able to see similarities and differences among diverse texts. This area allows for a further exploration of literary and linguistic concerns, examples, interpretations and readings by studying a grouping of texts set by the teacher or set in close conversation with a class or groups of students. Students will gain an awareness of how texts can provide critical lenses to reading other texts and of how they can support a text's interpretation by expanding on it or question it by providing a different point of view.

Intertextuality: connecting texts can be approached in a variety of ways, such as . . .

• Through the study of a group of texts from the same text type or literary form (for example, advertisements, drama or short stories respectively)

• A study of chronological development (for example, the tale, the elegy, political oration, the newspaper)

• A consideration of mode (for example, satire, action-adventure, parody)

• An exploration of a topic or concept (for example, fame, gender, power, social code, values, the hero)

• An investigation into a theoretical perspective or debate in language or literature (for example literary value, feminism, cognitive theory, critical discourse theory).

​This area of exploration aims to give students a sense of the ways in which texts exist in a system of relationships with other communicative acts past and present. Students will further engage with literary and linguistic traditions and new directions by considering the following guiding conceptual questions:

• How do texts adhere to and deviate from conventions associated with literary forms or text types?

• How do conventions and systems of reference evolve over time?

• In what ways can diverse texts share points of similarity?

• How valid is the notion of a classic text?

• How can texts offer multiple perspectives of a single issue, topic or theme?

• In what ways can comparison and interpretation be transformative?

Possible links to TOK :

​Links to TOK in this area are related to the question of how the interaction of a text with other texts, brought about explicitly by the author or established by the reader in the act of reception, influence the perception of them and their meaning.

• What are the boundaries between a literary text and a non-literary text, and how are these boundaries determined?

• What kind of knowledge about a text is gained when compared and contrasted with other texts?

• Does knowledge of conventions of form, text type and of literary and rhetorical techniques allow for a better and deeper understanding of a text?

• How are judgements made about the merit of a text? What makes a text better than others?

• Is the study of texts better approached by means of a temporal perspective, grouping texts according to when they were written, or by means of a thematic approach, grouping them according to the theme or concern they share?

• What impact does each one of them have on knowledge of the discipline?

• How useful are classifications of texts according to form, text type and period?

• How do they contribute to the understanding of communication and its development? ​​​

​Taken from Language A: language and literature guide

First assessment 2021