English Literature - Post GCSE

“The books transported her into new worlds and introduced her to amazing people who lived exciting lives. She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling. She travelled all over the world while sitting in her little room in an English village.”

Roald Dahl ‘Matilda’

The course: OCR H472

Component 01 – exam 2 hours and 30 minutes 40% Closed text

You will study one Shakespeare play, a collection of Rossetti’s poetry and Wilde’s An Ideal Husband.

Component 02 – exam 2 hours and 45 minutes 40% closed text. You will study at least two American novels written between 1880-1940: Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’ and ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ by Steinbeck. You will also respond to an unseen extract from the same time period

Component 03 – coursework 20%Two essays: one comparing two texts; one close reading or re-creative piece with commentary. You will study Williams’ ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’, Ian McEwan’s ‘Atonement’ and Carol Ann Duffy’s poetry collection ‘Feminine Gospels’.

A taste of what we do…

Read through the following five extracts.

Spend ten-fifteen minutes annotating each extract with answers to the questions below.

Highlight any words and phrases that support your ideas

What is the tone of the passage

What genre(s) can you identify?

What do you learn about character?

What is significant about setting?

What do you learn about the narrative voice?

Can you identify any themes?

Extract 1 From ‘Pride and Prejudice’ Jane Austen 1813 (ch1)

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.

However little known the feelings or views of such a man may be on his first entering a neighbourhood, this truth is so well fixed in the minds of the surrounding families, that he is considered the rightful property of some one or other of their daughters.

“My dear Mr. Bennet,” said his lady to him one day, “have you heard that Netherfield Park is let at last?”

Mr. Bennet replied that he had not.

“But it is,” returned she; “for Mrs. Long has just been here, and she told me all about it.”

Mr. Bennet made no answer.

“Do you not want to know who has taken it?” cried his wife impatiently.

“You want to tell me, and I have no objection to hearing it.”

This was invitation enough.

“Why, my dear, you must know, Mrs. Long says that Netherfield is taken by a young man of large fortune from the north of England; that he came down on Monday in a chaise and four to see the place, and was so much delighted with it, that he agreed with Mr. Morris immediately; that he is to take possession before Michaelmas, and some of his servants are to be in the house by the end of next week.”

“What is his name?”

“Bingley.”

“Is he married or single?”

“Oh! Single, my dear, to be sure! A single man of large fortune; four or five thousand a year. What a fine thing for our girls!”

“How so? How can it affect them?”

“My dear Mr. Bennet,” replied his wife, “how can you be so tiresome! You must know that I am thinking of his marrying one of them.”

Extract 2 from ‘1984’ George Orwell 1949 (Ch1)

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of gritty dust from entering along with him. The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face, more than a metre wide: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of times it was seldom working, and at present the electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week.

The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it ran. Inside the flat a fruity voice was reading out a list of figures which had something to do with the production of pig-iron. The voice came from an oblong metal plaque like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of the right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice sank somewhat, though the words were still distinguishable. The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely. He moved over to the window: a smallish, frail figure, the meagreness of his body merely emphasized by the blue overalls which were the uniform of the party. His hair was very fair, his face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.

Extract 3 from ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles’ Thomas Hardy 1891 (Ch2)

A young member of the band turned her head at the exclamation. She was a fine and handsome girl--not handsomer than some others, possibly--but her mobile peony mouth and large innocent eyes added eloquence to colour and shape. She wore a red ribbon in her hair, and was the only one of the white company who could boast of such a pronounced adornment.

…

Tess Durbeyfield at this time of her life was a mere vessel of emotion untinctured by experience. The dialect was on her tongue to some extent, despite the village school: the characteristic intonation of that dialect for this district being the voicing approximately rendered by the syllable ur, probably as rich an utterance as any to be found in human speech. The pouted-up deep red mouth to which this syllable was native had hardly as yet settled into its definite shape, and her lower lip had a way of thrusting the middle of her top one upward, when they closed together after a word.

Phases of her childhood lurked in her aspect still. As she walked along today, for all her bouncing handsome womanliness, you could sometimes see her twelfth year in her cheeks, or her ninth sparkling from her eyes; and even her fifth would flit over the curves of her mouth now and then.

Extract 4 from ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Margaret Atwood 1985 (Ch1)

We yearned for the future. How did we learn it, that talent for insatiability? It was in the air; and it was still in the air, an afterthought, as we tried to sleep, in the army cots that had been set up in rows, with spaces between so we could not talk. We had flannelette sheets, like children’s, and army-issue blankets, old ones that still said u.s. We folded our clothes neatly and laid them on the stools at the ends of the beds. The lights were turned down but not out. Aunt Sara and Aunt Elizabeth patrolled; they had electric cattle prods slung on thongs from their leather belts.

No guns though, even they could not be trusted with guns. Guns were for the guards, specially picked from the Angels. The guards weren’t allowed inside the building except when called, and we weren’t allowed out, except for our walks, twice daily, two by two around the football field which was enclosed now by a chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. The Angels stood outside it with their backs to us. They were objects of fear to us, but of something else as well. If only they would look. If only we could talk to them. Something could be exchanged, we thought, some deal made, some trade-off, we still had our bodies. That was our fantasy.

We learned to whisper almost without sound. In the semi-darkness we could stretch out our arms, when the Aunts weren’t looking, and touch each other’s hands across space. We learned to lip-read, our heads flat on the beds, turned sideways, watching each other’s mouths. In this way we exchanged names, from bed to bed:

Alma. Janine. Dolores. Moira. June.

Extract 5 from The Kite Runner 2003 Khaled Hosseini (Ch1)

I became what I am today at the age of twelve, on a frigid overcast day in the winter of 1975. I remember the precise moment, crouching behind a crumbling mud wall, peeking into the alley near the frozen creek. That was a long time ago, but it’s wrong what they say about the past, I’ve learned, about how you can bury it. Because the past claws its way out. Looking back now, I realize I have been peeking into that deserted alley for the last twenty-six years.

One day last summer, my friend Rahim Khan called from Pakistan. He asked me to come see him. Standing in the kitchen with the receiver to my ear, I knew it wasn’t just Rahim Khan on the line. It was my past of unatoned sins. After I hung up, I went for a walk along Spreckels Lake on the northern edge of Golden Gate Park. The early-afternoon sun sparkled on the water where dozens of miniature boats sailed, propelled by a crisp breeze. Then I glanced up and saw a pair of kites, red with long blue tails, soaring in the sky. They danced high above the trees on the west end of the park, over the windmills, floating side by side like a pair of eyes looking down on San Francisco, the city I now call home. And suddenly Hassan’s voice whispered in my head: For you, a thousand times over. Hassan the harelipped kite runner.

I sat on a park bench near a willow tree. I thought about something Rahim Khan said just before he hung up, almost as an afterthought. There is a way to be good again. I looked up at those twin kites. I thought about Hassan. Thought about Baba. Ali. Kabul. I thought of the life I had lived until the winter of 1975 came along and changed everything. And made me what I am today.

A Level literature: story-telling, how stories are told and how they create the impact that they do.

Read the following two poems about fleas and consider:

• What’s the story being told?

• What’s the chief purpose of telling this story?

• Why does the writer choose to tell it the way that they do?

Poem 1 (Anon)

A flea and a fly in a flue

were trapped, so what could they do?

Said the flea, “Let us fly!”

Said the fly, “Let us flee!”

So they flew through a flaw in the flue.

Poem 2 (Spike Miligan)

An odd little thing is a flea;

You can’t tell a he from a she.

But he can –

And she can –

Whoopee!

Poem 3

The final flea poem is from the 17th century, by a writer called John Donne.

He is one of England’s greatest love poets

He is one of the Metaphysical poets:

- reacting against smooth, polished, unrealistic love poetry of his time

- focusing on down-to-earth, “unromantic” but red-blooded passionate lyrics

- you can’t get much more unromantic than a flea …

Before you read poem 3…

You have to imagine a young man and his girlfriend.

Her parents don’t approve

We don’t actually know if he loves her (watch out for the word “love” in this poem) but he is pressing her to yield her maidenhead – her virginity – to him

She is denying him (why?)

And then he notices a flea which has apparently bitten both of them …

THE FLEA.

by John Donne

MARK but this flea, and mark in this,

How little that which thou deniest me is ;

It suck'd me first, and now sucks thee,

And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.

Thou know'st that this cannot be said

A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead ;

Yet this enjoys before it woo,

And pamper'd swells with one blood made of two ;

And this, alas ! is more than we would do.

O stay, three lives in one flea spare,

Where we almost, yea, more than married are.

This flea is you and I, and this

Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is.

Though parents grudge, and you, we're met,

And cloister'd in these living walls of jet.

Though use make you apt to kill me,

Let not to that self-murder added be,

And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.

Cruel and sudden, hast thou since

Purpled thy nail in blood of innocence?

Wherein could this flea guilty be,

Except in that drop which it suck'd from thee?

Yet thou triumph'st, and say'st that thou

Find'st not thyself nor me the weaker now.

'Tis true ; then learn how false fears be ;

Just so much honour, when thou yield'st to me,

Will waste, as this flea's death took life from thee.

Some thoughts about how the story is told:

Note the opening words of each stanza

Look at the rhyme scheme – what effect does it have?

How is the flea itself used in the poem?

As an example? (lines 1 and 2)

As a metaphor? (line 12)

As a symbol? (of what?)

For humour/wit/surprise?

So…

The story is important

But in English Literature, how it is told matters too.

In an English Literature A level, you can look forward to encountering lots of different stories – and enjoying the discovery of all the different ways in which they can be told.

Suggested reading

These are made on the basis of (a) novels that are recognised “classics”, texts that have been influential over a long period; and (b) novels that we have greatly enjoyed and hope that you will too!

18th Century (very much the early days of the novel)

Daniel Defoe - Moll Flanders (Moll tells her own story of how a woman on her own can keep body and soul together in 18th Century England)

Jonathan Swift - Gulliver’s Travels (much more than just Lilliput – a biting social satire)

Laurence Sterne - The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy (a wonderful book. Anarchic, rambling, funny, clever. The recent film “A Cock and Bull Story” tried to capture its flavour)

19th Century (the flourishing of the novel in all its glory)

Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility...

Mary Shelley - Frankenstein (with yet another distorted adaptation coming to the cinemas: this is the original story)

George Eliot - Middlemarch (a door-stop of a book, but absolutely worth it: love, idealism, corruption, ambition...)

Charles Dickens - Nicholas Nickleby or take your pick...

Charlotte Brontë - Jane Eyre (one of the most famous and iconic romances in literature)

Emily Brontë - Wuthering Heights (the classic Gothic love story)

Bram Stoker - Dracula (another Gothic classic)

Twentieth Century Classics

Evelyn Waugh - Brideshead Revisited (“a poignant story of the loss of love and innocence”)

E M Forster - Howard’s End (a novel of class and personal relationships in the early years of the century)

Aldous Huxley - Brave New World (a classic of dystopian fiction, as is...)

George Orwell - 1984 (Winston Smith’s attempts to rebel against Big Brother)

Margaret Atwood - The Handmaid’s Tale (much talked about at the moment with a TV series having created quite a stir)

Khaled Hosseini - The Kite Runner (on our A-Level teaching syllabus until 2015; a powerful tale of friendship, betrayal and redemption from the early 21st Century)

American Literature from 1880-1940

Reading literature from this genre will improve your knowledge and understanding of both contexts of reception and production which are worth 50% of the marks in the exam.

Henry James - The Portrait of a Lady

Mark Twain - Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Theodore Dreiser - Sister Carrie

Willa Cather - My Ántonia

Edith Wharton - The Age of Innocence

William Faulkner - The Sound and the Fury

Ernest Hemingway - A Farewell to Arms

Richard Wright - Native Son

Anything by John Steinbeck

Anything by F Scott Fitzgerald