A Clockwork Orange

Hello, my lovelies,and finally I have managed to get something on the blog about this novel, with the useful links, I hope. It is an amazing text, not just because of the incredibly inventive use of language, but because of the ways in which it is constructed-one of the best novels to look at in terms of overall structure, and very good for AO2 as a result...

Anyway, here's the Amazon link for copies as cheap as 1p (plus P&P which makes it more expensive) so do rememebr to get a copy (or ask for one for Christmas). Don't forget the charity shops, which often have excellent bargains--Oxfam Bookshop in St Giles is especially good, but also the Summertown ones are helpful, and often have surprising bargains.

If you are interested in the music that we were thinking about in the lesson, here are the youtube links, though of course it's probably better to buy the album, and listen peacefully to the whole thing in your own time...

Anyway, if you want to listen to Mozart's Jupiter (symphony 41) get a taste of the first part of it here conducted by Herbert Von Karajan. Wonderfully subtle. Here's the second part and you can probably find the rest yourself from that.

Other music mentioned is, of course, Beethoven's ninth symphony. The one we listened to in class (performed in front of Pope Benedict) is,. I think, the finest avilable on this medium, but please tell me if you fnd a better version. Here is the one conducted by Bernstein, which I like as well.

Here is something even rarer--A version conducted by Toscanini in 1948. Which version do you prefer, and why?

I've just had a chat with an expert on Burgess, and asked him for something to add to the blog... He commented:

'Burgess was himself a composer, and had a deep understanding of the Western musical tradition. In A Clockwork Orange he may be not only critiquing the world of Mods and Rockers, but also commenting on their musical taste...

Though Burgess's stylistic experimentation reflects his reverence for the work of James Joyce ( in particular Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake) he was in many ways a conservative cultural thinker (in the best sense of conservative) hence he throws into prominence here the iconic works within the western musical tradition.

Burgess himself wrote critical works explicating the difficult works of James Joyce for the common reader. He particularly admired Joyce's love of wordplay and pun; Joyce's sense of the poetry of language and also his sense of the games that can be played with it. It is these things that we see manifest in Burgess's own games with language in A Clockwork Orange.

In some ways, some rather starkly expressed theological ideas underlie the whole drift of A Clockwork Orange. As Burgess sees it, freedom and free will are crucial to the full dignity of a human being. To be reduced to an automaton, a person automatically obedient, is to cease to be fully human. One might think of Paradise Lost here. Milton portrays Satan as a fallen angel--both the adjective and the noun needing to be given equal weight. Satan is charismatic, courageous and ingenious, all excellent qualities deriving from his status as an angelic being made by God, but he is now fallen, so that these admirable qualities are now given over to selfish and destructive ends. But Satan is vibrantly alive: he is still free (in some sense) to choose his actions.

In the same way, at the beginning of A Clockwork Orange Alex displays a certain kind of life and vitality, a quality of leadership, a certain verve, even though these things are deployed to violent and evil ends. When, however, Alex is conditioned so that he no longer has free will, his humanity is neutered, made pale and unreal: he loses the capacity for evil, but he also loses the capacity for good, and the perception of beauty. He is now shut off from the kind of transcendental uplift to which the great music of the Western tradition gave him access. As far as Burgess is concerned, Mozart and Beethoven embody the highest reaches of the human spirit. Their works point towards the transcendent dignity fon what it means to be human, the divine spark in all of us. When Alex is shut off from this it is a terrible deprivation and a terrible torture. He would, paradoxically, be more human by having the freedom to be more evil.

He makes some good points here, I think--read the novel over the break, and let me know if you agree with him or not.

Tony Harrison again

Look at this interview with Harrison on radio 3--the transcript you can find here says some interesting things about his schooldays, including a close description of the generation of 'Them and [uz]'. What do you think?

Robert Frost

Great poet; but you need some background detail. Try looking at these sites about his life and work. Poetry of Robert Frost gives you, as it suggests, texts of many of the major poems, and links to some important criticism as well. Fun stuff. There's also a concise biography at online Literature, which you might find interesting.

If you're looking for more detail in terms of biography, try the timeline I mentioned in class, which you can find here.

While you are choosing which courswework piece to do, you should really comtemplate 'The Road not Taken', don't you think? Written in 1916; still resonates today.

The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.



Frost apparently wrote this thinking of his friend Edward Thomas; the friend who went off to war he mentions here:

"One stanza of 'The Road Not Taken' was written while I was sitting on a sofa in the middle of England: was found three or four years later, and I couldn't bear not to finish it. I wasn't thinking about myself there, but about a friend who had gone off to war, a person who, whichever road he went, would be sorry he didn't go the other. He was hard on himself that way."
Bread Loaf Writers' Conference August 1953

Look at Thomas's own poem 'The Signpost'. It makes a fascinating comparison!

The Sign-Post

The dim sea glints chill. The white sun is shy,
And the skeleton weeds and the never-dry,
Rough, long grasses keep white with frost
At the hill-top by the finger-post;
The smoke of the traveller's-joy is puffed
Over hawthorn berry and hazel tuft.
I read the sign. Which way shall I go?
A voice says: "You would not have doubted so
At twenty." Another voice gentle with scorn
Says: "At twenty you wished you had never been born."
One hazel lost a leaf of gold
From a tuft at the tip, when the first voice told
The other he wished to know what 'twould be
To be sixty by this same post. "You shall see,"
He laughed -and I had to join his laughter -
"You shall see; but either before or after,
Whatever happens, it must befall.
A mouthful of earth to remedy all
Regrets and wishes shall be freely given;
And if there be a flaw in that heaven
'Twill be freedom to wish, and your wish may be
To be here or anywhere talking to me,
No matter what the weather, on earth,
At any age between death and birth, -
To see what day or night can be,
The sun and the frost, tha land and the sea,
Summer, Winter, Autumn, Spring, -
With a poor man of any sort, down to a king,
Standing upright out in the air
Wondering where he shall journey, O where?"

Edward Thomas

Satire--how to look at background research

If you're considering writing about A Modest Proposal you do need to have some background sense of what satire is, its origins, and the context for Swift's writing. Try listening to : this programme about Roman satire from 'In Our Time'--which as a resource is invaluable. A great way to educate yourself about the arts is just to browse through these programmes where cultural issues are discussed by a team of experts.

Think also about using the BBC history site to give you some sense of historical context and background. For instance, look at this crystal-clear article on The Glorious Revolution by Dr Edward Vallance

Another extremely useful site is The Victorian Web. This invaluable resource gives reliable background information and critical reading for many key texts that we'll look at this year. Look at their take on the Glorious revolution here, for instance.

For even better detail about specific authors go to the author pages on the Victorian Web. Here, you can find all about Swift, even though strictly speaking he isn't a Victorian, with links for his biography and literary context as well.

Them and [uz]; some thoughts, now you've written your essays

The title of this poem turns round the more common saying ‘us and them’ which is often used in the context of a social divide, with the lower classes emphatically ‘them’. Here, Harrison reverses the expected order, to emphasise the word ‘us’, which he renders in the style of the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), so as to detail its pronunciation. This ‘us’ is spoken with a northern accent, and the difference between it and the southern pronunciation, and the status accorded to each, is the issue on which the poem turns.

The dedication to the poem reveals its split interests between the academic and the sociological. Leon Cortez was a musician of the thirties and forties who wrote popular comic songs. Richard Hoggart (left) is an academic, the author of The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-class Life, and someone who in many respects led the way for writers like Harrison to enter the formal poetic canon of literature. Harrison here accords them equal status, perhaps because they represent two different types of inspiration and example, two examples of ‘uz’ as opposed to the ‘them’ of the establishment. Hoggart is himself from Leeds, and his entry into the academic establishment, and his appreciation of D.H. Lawrence, for instance, would be something that may have inspired the young Harrison, Lawrence being, even in the 1950s and 60s, a writer whose working-class roots, and use of sexual colloquialisms had led to his exclusion from the canon.

The poem focuses throughout on the prestige accorded to Standard English, and Received Pronunciation. Received Pronunciation, or RP, is the ‘neutral’ accent of the dialect of Standard English, strongly associated with the upper register of speech. It is the dialect of Southern England, and also of upper-class speakers. At the time when Harrison wrote the poem, announcers on the BBC, for instance, would be expected to speak using Standard English and RP, and regional accents would have been seen as vulgar or comical. Northern pronunciation, like Harrison’s, would have been mocked as non-standard (in the way that an Irish or a Caribbean accent can still be mocked in certain contexts) and as a boy, Harrison would have been expected to take hold of the ‘advantages’ that his grammar-school education offered him in the way of accent modification. The expectation that he should do this is clearly the starting point for the painful memories that form the basis of this poem.

Throughout the poem, Harrison shows off his extensive knowledge of literature and culture so as to negate and exorcise the demons of self-doubt sown by his upbringing. He also demonstrates his technical skill; while apparently writing freely and colloquially, he creates a finely-wrought structure of strongly rhymed couplets—a traditional form for satiric verse.

The poem starts with a vivid rendition of Greek speech, ‘αĩ, αĩ’, which effectively isolates the reader who cannot read Greek letters. The fact that they are immediately transliterated into the English ‘ay, ay’ only emphasises the inadequacy of the monoglot reader. Harrison here aligns himself with the famous Greek orator Demosthenes, who reputedly suffered from a stammer. Demosthenes is said to have


cured himself of this affliction by walking along the beach, and practising speaking while he had sea-worn pebbles in his mouth (a modern version of this can be seen in the film My Fair Lady where Professor Higgins puts marbles into Eliza’s mouth to help her pronunciation). Using the slang word ‘gob’ faced against this classical reference demonstrates the range of Harrison’s learning and emphasises the extent to which his accent and use of dialect is a free choice, and not, as his teacher seems to have imagined, a lack of education or intelligence.


The incident recorded in ll. 3-5 is especially ironic; Harrison remembers a teacher stopping him during a recital of part of the opening words of a Keats poem, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’. The opening lines of the poem are: ‘My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains, / My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk’. Harrison’s rendition of this is couched in imitative accent: ‘mi ‘art aches’, and his teacher’s reaction to this is portrayed as violent. He describes his heart as ‘broken’ by the sound of the recital, and stigmatises Harrison as a ‘barbarian’, explaining that all poetry should be in RP. This sort of moment of humiliation is something often recounted in literature; you might think of Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, or Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, where authority figures similarly mock the protagonist. As in these books, Harrison’s humiliation is exacerbated by the knowledge, gained in later life, but felt instinctively at this early stage, that the teacher is wrong—not just wrong to do this in a humane sense, but wrong in his assumptions about the nature of literature.

The mature Harrison gets his revenge through an interpolation in brackets ‘(even Cockney Keats?)’, which indicates his superior knowledge of poetry: unlike the teacher, he is aware that Keats himself had been mocked by the aristocratic critical establishment of his day because of his London accent. In other words, Keats had been accused of being lower-class and uncouth on the basis of his voice, in much the same way as Harrison had. Aligning himself with a powerful poet in this way, Harrison threatens all his teacher’s judgements; he establishes his superiority in the dialogue, and demonstrates his linguistic expertise by deftly rendering his teacher’s accent in the IPA as [ΛЅ].

Throughout the poem, Harrison remembers his teacher as calling him ‘T.W’. Presumably his initials were used as a means of distancing the teacher from the student. Harrison remembers the language of contempt: ‘He was nicely spoken’. The phrase has the resonance of childhood; it is the sort of comment made about well-behaved children. The teacher’s speech is described as ‘nice’ a word, in this context, meaning not just pleasant, but correct, exact, in a way which infers the manner in which the teacher himself is submissive to the establishment. The teacher describes Harrison’s attempt at reciting Keats as an attack on English itself: ‘can’t have our glorious heritage done to death!’ The exclamation here, and the semantic field of words such as ‘glorious’ and ‘heritage’ seek to further distance the young, Northern boy from the well-spoken southern teacher. He is relegated to ‘the drunken porter’, the role chosen for him implicitly appropriate because it is comic and vulgar.

Harrison uses here the distinction between verse and prose frequently found in Shakespeare—that verse is generally used in serious contexts, and prose frequently for comedy—to amplify his teacher’s prejudice. From his point of view, prose is a lower form of art, and the only sort of writing to which Harrison can aspire. His speech—that is, the everyday speech, ‘the language that I spoke at home’ is described as bankrupt—though Harrison wittily refers indirectly to this clichéd expression by saying, more obliquely, that it is ‘in the hands of the receivers’. The teacher’s harsh correction ‘we say’ effectively shuts Harrison out from the elite ‘we’ by virtue of his accent, and he expresses his silencing in ironic colloquialism (‘That shut my trap’) and the use of language associated with servility: ‘I doffed my flat ‘a’s’. The awkward Northern speech is imaged as unsightly, even diseased: ‘great / lumps..to hawk up and spit out’.

In section II, Harrison becomes more explicit about his anger and his revenge on his childhood experience. He decides to ‘take over’ poetry in another financial metaphor (‘We’ll occupy / your lousy leasehold’), and like some fairy-tale giant, ‘chewed up Littererchewer and spat the bones’. The misspelling of ‘Literature’ here both enacts the meaning (it is litter, to be chewed up) and mocks insistence on regular spelling with its phonetic imitation. Harrison breaks the rules that he has been taught, that he has submitted to, and recovers his own voice in an entirely literal sense: ‘[uz] [uz] [uz]’. His anger is evident as the pace of the poem speeds up, the emphatic repetitions urging on the solid rhymes as he re-invents himself as ‘Tony’ and forgets his childhood initials.

In the final stanza, Harrison re-asserts his poetic authority. Wordsworth’s Westmoreland accent makes, as he points out, matter rhyme with water—exactly the flat ‘a’ sound that he has had to ‘lose’ as a child at school. He reclaims his status as a Northern speaker, discarding the rules about how to ‘aspirate’, that is, to pronounce ‘correctly’ the initial ‘h’ sound on a word like ‘heart’ in the line from Keats (to ‘drop one’s aiches’ used to be a signifier of low class). Harrison is rebelling, in this poem, against the way in which the poetic establishment had, in his childhood, claimed Keats as a poet of the upper class, and ignored his lower middle class, liberal roots. He is rebelling against a perceived ahistorical cultural rewriting of history in which ‘Standard’ English is privileged over the spoken word of the poet himself.

In a final example of how easily this prioritizing can happen Harrison recounts with wonder and amusement how when he was finally ‘successful’ as a writer, and was mentioned in The Times, presumably in a review, the paper made a hyper-correction; wrongly believing ‘Tony’ to be an abbreviation of ‘Anthony’ they ‘corrected’ it, as he says ‘automatically’. The exclamation at the end of the poem enacts his wry amusement here: the official written word is already, implicitly, smoothing over the perceived roughness of the poet.

Tony Harrison

If any of you would like to try your luck with the reading of 'National Trust', you can find it here on the poetry archive site, though I still can't get the sound to work. You can listen again to 'Them and [uz]' here if you want to, and there's also an interesting interview with Tony Harrison on The poetry channel.

If you've enjoyed looking at the Tony Harrison poems we've done in class, you might also enjoy listening to his poem 'Initial Illumination'. He is a real wordsmith, and it is enormously enlightening to hear him talking about the ways in which he composes.

A challenge--what has this picture of a cormorant got to do with Tony Harrison?

Mariana

Such a gloomy poem--but so brilliantly created that you don't realise quite how cleverly you're being manipulated until you take it apart. I hope you enjoyed looking at it, and thinking about the pictures related to it.

It does make me think about the ennui of the Victorian woman who did not have to work--protected, but also somehow stifled. How aware do you think Tennyson was of the undercurrents in his writing here?

Here's another version of Mariana by a rather less well-known pre-raphaelite painter--this one looks to me rather cheerier, and as though she does think it possible that Angelo may return... what do you think? Interesting to contrast her cheery tulips with the leaves in the version by Millais.
She reminds me slightly of someone in a dutch interior--solemn, but not enervated, as the other seems.

Summer Reading--important news

Just in case you haven't got enough---12C, or 13C as you should be really, I have been in touch with Mrs Eve, and she says that although she hasn't made any final decisions about the gothic texts she is planning to do with you next year it is more than likely that it will be 'Paradise Lost', 'Wuthering Heights' and 'The Bloody Chamber', though she is also considering 'Dr Faustus'. She will probably start with 'Wuthering Heights' or 'Paradise Lost'.

Good preparation, therefore, would be to read Wuthering Heights and The Bloody Chamber, and to try and understand what happens in Books I and II of Paradise Lost (she says you could do this even using sparknotes.com or a similar site). Of course if you could read it in the original that would be still better...

Very good preparation for Paradise Lost is not just to read it, but to have a look at Genesis and the openings of one of the classical epics such as The Iliad or The Odyssey to see where Milton found his models.

Bear in mind that these texts are on my reading list, so you can kill two birds with one stone here--you don't have to end up reading hundreds of books. They also count for the texts written by authors on the literary canon that Ms Cate asked you to look at.

Next year for both my groups I shall be working on the coursework with you. Please make sure that whatever else you do over the holiday, you come to class prepared to talk about at least one book that you have read over the summer, with a handout to share your ideas with the other students, as this is how we shall start next year's work. I'll share my summer reading with you as well!

Any problems about all of this, please contact me by e-mail--or put a comment on this site, and I'll see it and reply (as long as internet access permits). You shouldn't feel overburdened by the reading, but as you are doing a coursework piece on two novels next year, this is an ideal chance to read a selection of different texts and start making choices--if you do reading now, you will have a freer hand with what you do for coursework.

Have a lovely holiday--and don't forget to feed the fish!

I sense a slight lack of interest...

It's true, isn't it? You're all relaxed and feeling holidayish and non-gothic. Well, if you are going to go on holiday, I shall too, but I am going to leave you my fish to feed, and a proper gothic reading list.

I hope that you return having read the prospective study texts--and some extras as well. You should really make the most of this long summer to get reading some serious novels so as to give yourselves a good choice for your comparative coursework. Think how different Jane Eyre will look now that you know all about feminist readings...

The transformation begins...

Welcome to the new and improved year 12 blog--now that you are, to all intents and purposes, year 13 students.

It is time to move on to the study of the gothic, and to discover the nature of Critical Theory. Ideas about both will be posted here in due course. In the meantime, what do you think of my new gadgets (the pictures)...?

What did you think of the paper?

Lovely 'ending's' question--and narrator/voice one! So hopefully you enjoyed it.

I thought that the Gatsby question was interesting as well--like a combination of the dream and the tragedy--writing on Chapter 9 would have put you in the zone for that.

Now we shall move on to the Gothic unit--12 C--and the Critical anthology for 12 E--so you should all be a) looking at Oxford Gothic buildings, and watching films of Frankenstein, and b) thinking about feminism and different ways of reading to prepare yourselves.

Enjoy work experience, and see you afterwards...

Pre-exam session tomorrow

Just before tomorrow's exam, there will be a session to remind you of the key points of Aspects of Narrative, in the hall. Don't be late.

DON'T FORGET TO BRING YOUR CLEAN COPIES OF YOUR TEXTS
YOU DON'T NEED COPIES OF THE POETRY--THIS WILL BE PROVIDED

YOU DO NEED COPIES OF GATSBY AND THE CURIOUS INCIDENT

GOOD LUCK EVERYONE!

REVISION SESSION

Just to let you know... Miss Stubbings is running a revision session for Aspects of Narrative on MONDAY after school in room 5. Do go if you need a bit of extra input--she has kindly said that she is happy to see students from other groups!

STOP PRESS if she is slightly late, PLEASE WAIT as there is a short staff meeting which she may have to go to first

I'm Back!

Yes, thanks to the miracle of the new router, my internet connection has been re-established--did you miss me? Or notice I was gone? All revising too hard for Tuesday, no doubt.

Remember, this exam is fine as long as you remember the AOs for each area.

Section Aa--AO2
Section Ab--AOs 1,3,4
Section B--AOs 1,2,3

Don't assume the examiner will notice how wonderful you are unless you signal it by telling them explicitly when you are looking at something in particular. Using words like form and structure really helps to let them realise that you are talking about form and structure!

ESSAYS READY FOR COLLECTION

Dear all-good-people-who wrote-essays. They have now been marked, so you can find them in a folder on the desk in ROOM 6

Enjoy!

The Great Gatsby

I've been thinking about the relationship between Gatsby and Daisy--the initial relationship that he explains retrospectively to Nick--and its implications for the rest of the novel (what a lot of retrospective narrative there is in the text, to be sure!)

It's probably hard for you to feel the force of the confession that he makes, but try to imagine that you are back in the aftermath of the First World War, at a time when young girls were very much protected, and there was a huge premium placed on chastity before marriage. There's Daisy, daghter of a rich family, queen of the neighbourhood, and there's Jay Gatz, with his foreign name and his lack of cash, his only attractions his good looks and his anonymising uniform that gives him a spurious respectability... and then look at these quotations again:

• It excited him, too, that many men had already loved Daisy—it increased her value in his eyes.

• He took what he could get, ravenously and unscrupulously— eventually he took Daisy one still October night, took her because he had no real right to touch her hand.

• He had intended, probably, to take what he could and go—but now he found that he had committed himself to the following of a grail.

• He felt married to her, that was all.

What do you think?

La Belle Dame Sans Merci

In some ways, this poem is like an object lesson in what to expect from a ballad. It starts in the middle of the story, there is an ambivalent ending, it has (lots of) structural repetition, there is a conventional four-line stanza form, ABCB rhyming scheme, archaic language and the depersonalised figures typical of ballads.

On the other hand, Keats makes it his own. there are many factors that individualise it, from the Shakespearean references (to Macbeth? Romeo and Juliet?) to the single-ended frame narrative. Did he copy that from Coleridge's double-ended frame narrative for The Amcient Mariner, do you think?

Anyway, one of the best ways to understand Keats (or Coleridge) and what they were trying to do by imitating ballads is to go and read some for yourself. This website will show you a fine collection. It is an archive of Child's Ballads (Francis Child was one of the most influential collectors of popular ballads in the 19th century. Have a look and let me know which is your favourite. How does 'La Belle Dame Snas Merci' compare?

The Eve of St Agnes

Tense changes are interesting in this poem--especially the ways in which Keats seems to move in and out of the past tense as he tells the story. He also seems to use the future tense with regard to Porphyro--which makes sense, I suppose, as he is always yearning away from the past to the future, and the possibilities that it brings.

Look at this picture by William Holman Hunt--isn't it interesting how he has imagined the scene? Everyone looks almost as though they are under the spell of Sleeping Beauty's castle, except that they're drunk after the party (rathr un-fairy-tale-like), while Porphyro and Madeleine creep past. Notice, though how this time they don't want to break the spell, whereas in the fairy-tale they do.

Actually, look at this site for some lovely, huge versions of paintings about the poem.

Making it clear

One thing that you really need to think about with this paper is the title--all those elements of narrative structure make up the 'how' of how the story is told (as opposed to the 'why' or the 'what'. IN section A you know that you have to discuss that, but in section B the questions can often lure you away, so that you're talking about the nature of time, or beginnings or endings or whatever, and not about how time is presented, or how endings are presented. It's almost as though you should add that bit to every question that you answer...

Words to impress the examiners...

Well, the first thing to say here is that accuracy is the thing that impresses the examiners most--so whatever long words you want to use, make sure that you are secure in their use (a good way is to see how they are used by other writers--which is why reading good critical prose is one of the best ways to enhance your vocabulary).

A realy good source for some key literary terms is the University of Cambridge English faculty website. This link takes you straight to their page on literary terms, and is a good place to start developing your own sense for what's useful.

The curious incident

I've been re-reading this, and as always, you notice new things each time. What strikes me nost at the moment is the strength of Christopher's desire to tell a story--there is an ancient-mariner-like element to him, I think, including the sense of occasional social inappropriateness...

That's something important about storytelling, isn;t it--the sense that the story needs to be told, that there's a point to it. Like in 'Fat' when Carver's narrator tells us that Rita doesn't get 'it', we know that there is an 'it' there to get, and implicitly we, the readers, are more likely to understand than Rita is. Christopher's address to the reader seems to have something of the same strength. He may say that the book is just a record that Siobhan told him to write, but there's that soryteller's edge there as well...

Time in the section B texts

I think if you're considering time in the texts, you have to think about the different ways in which it is used to structure the narrative. If you consider the most common way to indicate time in writing--the use of different tenses--this can sharpen your account. So, for instance, look at the tense-shift at the end of 'The Eve of St Agnes', or during 'La Belle Dame'.

Otherwise, consider how Haddon uses time differently--subjective time ' it seemed ages' and objective time 'seven minutes after midnight' and how those two interact to suggest things about character and perspective.

What about how the wedding-guest's anxiety about time (what is happening with the wedding) interacts with the Mariner's tale?

How to approach an essay for Section B

For section B, you have to remember to make connections NOT comparisons. You do not have to struggle to find out ways in which your texts relate to each other.

Remember, you can write three separate sections here and still be relevant--in fact, writing a (timed) section at a time is a good way to practise for this paper. It is also good to know just what you can write, in terms of length, at full tilt in 20 mins--don't plan for more than that in the exam, or you will write half a geat essay.

You do not have to treat all sections exactly equally--BUT do not expect to get good marks if you write a page on two texts and one paragraph on the third.

Things that are bad to do include:

• putting in irrelevant information just because you know it
• Shoe-horning in context ditto
• quoting critics unless they are spot-on relevant
• retelling the story (the examiner KNOWS it!)
• Feature spotting (more on this later)
• Not mentioning the question or addressing it
• constantly repeating the question because you can't think of anything to say
• Not referring to your texts.

Things that are good to do include:

• precise reference to the terms of the question, drawing them out to create a genuinely interesting discussion.
• using your knowledge of narrative techniques properly--relating them to features of the story and the meaning created.
• Giving examples with quotation and detailed analysis
• Thinking all the time 'HOW?' that is--not 'what' is the story being told, but 'how' is it told?
• Don't forget your section A skills! Consider the use of Narrative voice and ‘voices’ more generally, Point of view, Key structural points: beginnings, climaxes, endings, Structural patterning, echoing, foreshadowing, repetition, Key significances, such as places, aspects of time and chronology.
• Don't write about character--but about characterisation
• Remember that the story does not come out of nowhere—you need to discuss the choices that the author has made when deciding how to tell this particular story

When you are planning, mahe the question the heart of your plan. You can even use a grid plan, as at GCSE, to make it clearer how to structure your answer. It might seem schematic, but it is better to have an answer tht ticks the boxes of the assessment criteria than one which wanders off the point.

Remember the AOs 1, 2 and 3. USE correct terminology--which should force you to analyse form and structure. Consider different ways of reading the text; how could it be read differently, and how does this add to its subtlety?

Just to let you know...

I shall be posting every day during the holiday, to keep you on track for revision, and find out if you have any problems you'd like me to investigate in further posts. However, today is Good Friday, so you should not be working (and neither should I) so I shall post at more length anon.

Narrative structures and how they change things

An interesting exercise to foreground your understanding of narrative is to think about how narratives would be different if they had some aspect of the narrative style changed. For instance, imagine The Great Gatsby told through an objective, omniscient third-person narrator. How different would this be from Nick's story? Would Nick feature very much at all?

By the way, speaking of The Great Gatsby, 12C, your revision guides should, I hope, have got to you by now--if not, then come and pick one up from the staffroom. As some of you were worryingly pro-active, I have a few named copies which probably need to go to other homes... Let me know.

Why would an ancient mariner be frightening?

I'm just wondering why it is, do you think, that the wedding-guest is 'spellbound' after only a short taste of the 'glittering eye' and the 'skinny hand'. Is it just his persistence? His force of personality? Or is there something so otherworldly about the mariner that he reduces the guest to the state of 'a three-year's child' without real effort?

I had a student once who wrote a fabulous recreative piece about the wedding-guest--why he was chosen by the mariner. Interesting to imagine a backstory, don't you think?

This is really purple prose

Before it was sort of pale pink...and I prefer this layout, I think, though not sure how the background will work with the pictures. That could change.

Anyway, well done year 12, for forcing me to create this, and well done Fergus for being my first follower--you get extra points for being nicely alliterative.

DON'T FORGET to sign up for the revision session on Thursday 15th if you are unable to manage a whole two weeks without contact with school--and in any case, keep up to date with the blog. I shall add more links later today, I promise.