English Language & Literature
Leaping into A level English Language & Literature – reading, listening and watching
Websites:
1. We are fortunate enough to have been offered the opportunity during the Coronavirus lockdown to stream for free a range of productions from the National Theatre.
Do feel free to pick and choose at will but in terms of our studies, ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ and ‘Hamlet’ are there for you to watch.
Your access details are: https://www.dramaonlinelibrary.com
Please email Mrs Warner-Bradshaw or Mrs Vaughn for the login details!
2. Another useful thing to do is access the Massolit lectures on their website.
Logon to massolit.io and create an account.
Once you are in you will be able to access a whole range of lectures on a variety of texts and subject areas. I would recommend any of the more general Shakespeare lectures as well as the one on ‘Hamlet’. There is also a very accessible lecture on ‘A Streetcar Named Desire.’
Activities:
We have listed here a range of activities that you might like to try. We don’t expect you to do all of these but we hope you enjoy working on those that you do complete.
1. Take a Risk With Your Reading
What sort of books do you usually read for pleasure? If you always read the same sort of novel or the same author or have got stuck in a rut of not knowing what next to read, why not try to read something completely different? Always read novels? Why not try a graphic novel? Always read horror? Why not try a novel written in verse?
How to find a new read:
Look at EMC’s list of great 21st-century reads for 6th formers.
Ask friends. Ask the people you know have really different tastes to you.
Follow writers, book clubs and book podcasts on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter.
Read book reviews.
Look at lists of best books, eg Guardian100BestNovels Guardian Best Books of the 21st Century
Write or record a review of your ‘out of your comfort zone read’. Share your review via the platform recommended and validated by your school.
Then take another risk with your reading. Keep being a risk taker! (What risk is there really? You don’t have to finish it if you hate it...)
2. Try Exploratory Writing
Choose a short text you have not studied before. This could be the opening of a novel, a poem, a scene from a play – it doesn’t matter what. (Some suggestions for where you can find extracts from different types of texts are suggested below.)
Read the text, without making notes.
Now write about it. Just write, in any way you want, almost as though you are having a conversation with yourself. Let your ideas develop and change, contradict yourself, ask questions – it’s up to you. The only rule is that you should write in full sentences, not notes or bullet points.
For novels, poetry, non-fiction, drama
Amazon’s ‘Look inside’ feature for a wide range of its book
New Yorker (limited number of articles/stories per month before subscribing)
Selected Shorts: Let Us Tell You Story
New York Times – First Chapters Archive
3. Dive into the World of Short Stories
This sequence of activities is based on a short story ‘Heads of the Colored People’ by the African American writer Nafissa Thompson-Spires. Some readers have found this prize-winning story a challenging, even controversial read. We wanted to include it here because it takes literature to a place quite far beyond what you experienced for GCSE. Because of the challenge it offers, we really recommend that you listen to the interviews with the author, Nafissa Thompson-Spires, before reading. This will give you some important context.
Imagine that while browsing online one day, you come across an interview with the author Nafissa Thompson Spires. In the interview she discusses her first collection of short stories Heads of the Colored People.
In May 2019, the collection was chosen as Washington DC’s ‘DC Reads’ book of the month and Nafissa Thompson-Spires took part in book clubs, interviews and discussions.
You do a bit of searching and discover that Thompson-Spires has done some more interviews – including one in which she reads the opening of her book’s first story, called
‘Heads of the Colored People: Four Fancy Sketches, Two Chalk Outlines and No Apology’.
Before reading this title story, think about the title. What do you make of it?
Listen to the reading and interview (from 25 seconds to up to 7 mins 30 seconds) here
You discover that the title story ‘Heads of the Colored People: Four Fancy Sketches, Two Chalk Outlines and No Apology’ is available online and decide to read it. Given the interview you heard and the opening you listened to, what do you expect from the rest of this story? How do you think it might be written?
Now read the story. Sometimes as a student of English you’ll be asked to pause, to reflect on what you have just read, to predict what you think will happen. Other times you will want simply to immerse yourself in a story and read it in one setting, before thinking about what it means, how it is written and how it makes you feel. In this case, the choice is up to you. Read extracts from the story here. As soon as you have finished reading, start to explore your response either in writing or by recording your thinking out loud on your phone.
Pull together your thinking by crystallising for yourself what you think the story is about. Write a sentence which goes something like ‘Heads of the Colored People’ is about ...... and .... But.....
Write a message to your teacher and the rest of the class, telling them what interested you about the interviews and what you thought about the story itself.
4. Immerse Yourself in a Virtual Library – The British Library’s Discovering Literature Website
The British Library’s Discovering Literature website is a real treasure trove for anyone interested in English. It includes hundreds of articles on texts from Chaucer to 21st century novels such as
Andrea Levey’s Small Island, plus images of many of the fascinating items in the British Library Collection.
The Discovering Library website is divided into the following periods:
Shakespeare [Including: Macbeth, Much Ado About Nothing, Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night, The Tempest]
Romantics and Victorian [Including: Wordsworth, Blake, Coleridge, Jane Eyre, Frankenstein, Pride and Prejudice, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Oliver Twist, A Christmas Carol, Hard Times, Christina Rossetti]
20th Century [Including: An Inspector Calls, Animal Farm, the poetry of Wilfred Owen, Nineteen Eighty-Four]
The first thing you could do is simply spend an hour or so exploring the different sections of the website, allowing yourself to follow whatever paths interest you. (It might be worth having a Word document open so that you can copy and paste titles and web addresses of anything you might want to return to later. But on this first visit, you could just be an interested browser!)
Over the next few weeks you could complete the British Library Critical Treasure Trail.
Read an article that’s caught your attention and select one key point – bit of treasure – from it. Use the links on the right-hand side of the web page to follow a critical trail through the site. Read two more articles, collecting bits of treasure as you go.
Share your treasure as quotations on the platform recommended and validated by your school. You could also record a short audio guide to the trail you followed and the treasure you found.
5. Create a ‘Five Books’ List
Every few weeks the website Five Books asks a writer to recommend five books on their area of particular expertise or interest. Sometimes these are new books, sometimes they are classics, sometimes they include books that were important to them in their childhood. But they are all linked to a topic in some way. The writer explains why these books are important to them – or should be read by everyone.
It’s a great way of finding something brilliant to read. Here are some examples of their young adult lists.
The Best Young Adult Science Fiction Books recommended by Estelle Francis
The Best Coming-of-Age Novels About Sisters recommended by Laura Wood
The best books on Political Engagement For Teens, recommended by Adrienne Kisner
What about creating your own list of Five Books on a topic or genre you have read a lot about?
For each book include the title and author, a cover if you can and why you have chosen it.
Start your list with a general introduction to you and your list.
Share your list with other people in your school – or publish it on the Five Books website as one of the Reader Lists.
6. Collate a Taster Anthology of Your Favourite Books
Publishers trying to encourage readers into reading a new author or new genre put together little taster anthologies. The anthology includes a cover and the opening few pages of 5 or 6 books, along with a mini-introduction.
Put together your own taste anthology to encourage other readers to try the books you particularly enjoy.
Begin by reminding yourself of some of the novels you have enjoyed over the last few years. (You can use the ‘Look inside’ feature on Amazon and Google books as a reminder.)
Decide what the idea behind your anthology will be: are you aiming it at a particular age? Or will it be genre or author-based? If these ideas don’t appeal, why not pretend to be a well-known writer asked to create a taster anthology of their favourite books.
Create your taster anthology.
7. Reading and Listening to More Short Stories
Short stories are a great way of immersing yourself in a really wide range of narrative texts. In just a few hours you can have read a 19th century ghost story, an experimental short story, a recent prize winner, a translated story, stories from all different parts of the world and in all sorts of different narrative traditions. Some of the websites with stories you can read for free are listed here:
New Yorker (limited number of articles/stories per month before subscribing)
Selected Shorts: Let Us Tell You A Story
Finding out more about the short story As you go through your A Level course and beyond you might also be interested in reading more about the short story form and getting ideas for what to read by browsing Chris Powers’ Guardian series ‘A Brief Survey of the Short Story’.
Fiction: Some classics for you to choose from:
None of these are your examination texts (although we do include other texts written by authors you will study).
We have chosen these as classics we know will extend your reading in a way that will benefit your studies but, more importantly, we hope will entertain and engross you in equal measure.
From Pre 20th Century:
Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility...
So many films and television versions of these two texts. Jane Austen’s wry observations mean she is as relevant and entertaining in the twenty first century as when these novels were penned originally.
With yet another distorted adaptation recently in the cinemas, this is the original story.
Charles Dickens – David Copperfield
We mention this so you have an excuse to watch the recent film version but really you can take your pick... There’s an awful lot more to choose from if you enjoyed your GCSE study of Great Expectations or A Christmas Carol.
One of the most famous and iconic romances in literature Orphaned as a child, Jane has felt an outcast her whole young life. Her courage is tested once again when she arrives at Thornfield Hall, where she has been hired by the brooding, proud Edward Rochester to care for his ward Adèle. Jane finds herself drawn to his troubled yet kind spirit. She falls in love. Hard.
Emily Brontë - Wuthering Heights
the classic Gothic love story; not our choice of set text for the exam but Edexcel deemed it worthy as an option…
another Gothic classic
From Post 20th Century:
Brideshead Revisited Evelyn Waugh
The most nostalgic and reflective of Evelyn Waugh's novels, Brideshead Revisited looks back to the golden age before the Second World War. It tells the story of Charles Ryder's infatuation with the Marchmains and the rapidly-disappearing world of privilege they inhabit. Enchanted first by Sebastian at Oxford, then by his doomed Catholic family, in particular his remote sister, Julia, Charles comes finally to recognize only his spiritual and social distance from them.
A strong-willed and intelligent woman refuses to allow the pretensions of her husband's smug English family to ruin her life. We study Forster’s ‘A Room With a View’ so it’s a good idea to read another of his novels in preparation for our study.
The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams
We study ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ so again it will be beneficial to you to read another text by the same writer.
Brave New World is a dystopian novel by English author Aldous Huxley, written in 1931 and published in 1932. Largely set in a futuristic World State, inhabited by genetically modified citizens and an intelligence-based social hierarchy, the novel anticipates huge scientific advancements in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and classical conditioning that are combined to make a dystopian society which is challenged by only a single individual: the story's protagonist.
The year 1984 has come and gone, but George Orwell's prophetic, nightmarish vision in 1949 of the world we were becoming is timelier than ever. 1984 is still the great modern classic of "negative utopia"—a startlingly original and haunting novel that creates an imaginary world that is completely convincing, from the first sentence to the last four words. No one can deny the novel's hold on the imaginations of whole generations, or the power of its admonitions—a power that seems to grow, not lessen, with the passage of time.
Non-Fiction: Some ideas for you to choose from:
read broadsheet newspapers for: Articles, Reportage, Reviews and Travelogues
selected Autobiographies / Biographies & Diaries / Memoirs guided by your interest
read and listen to Blogs and Podcasts guided by your interest
read, watch and listen to Interviews as broadcast
watch Speeches as broadcast or on catch up devices
Again, none of the non-fiction whole texts below are your examination texts, but we have chosen these as examples of how you might extend your reading in a way that will benefit your studies; entertain and engross you.
From Pre 20th Century:
De Profundis is a 50,000 word letter written by Oscar Wilde during his imprisonment in Reading Gaol, to Lord Alfred Douglas, his lover. In it, he details his sense of redemption and fulfilment in his ordeal, realising that his hardship had filled the soul with the fruit of experience, however bitter it tasted at the time.
‘A Vindication of the Rights of Women’ Mary Wollstonecraft
Writing in an age when the call for the rights of man had brought revolution to America and France, Mary Wollstonecraft produced her own declaration of female independence in 1792. Passionate and forthright, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman laid out the principles of emancipation: an equal education for girls and boys, an end to prejudice, and for women to become defined by their profession, not their partner. It established her as the mother of modern feminism.
From Post 20th Century:
‘An Evil Cradling’ Brian Keenan
Brian Keenan went to Beirut in 1985 for a change of scene from his native Belfast. He became headline news when he was kidnapped by fundamentalist Shi'ite militiamen and held in the suburbs of Beirut for the next four and a half years.
For much of that time he was shut off from all news and contact with anyone other than his jailers and, later, his fellow hostages, amongst them John McCarthy.
‘Notes From a Small Island’ Bill Bryson
After nearly two decades spent on British soil, Bill Bryson decided to return to the United States. But before departing, he set out on a grand farewell tour of the green and kindly island that had so long been his home.
Veering from the ludicrous to the endearing and back again, Notes from a Small Island is an uproarious social commentary that conveys the true glory of Britain, from the satiric pen of an unapologetic Anglophile.
Life on Air’ by David Attenborough
David Attenborough hardly needs any introduction; his voice has accompanied so many of the best natural history programs that have graced our televisions over several decades. Life On Air, his autobiography, tells the story of how he has managed to professionalise his schoolboy interests in such a remarkably successful way.