Exam Success

Bear in mind this tip from the Chief Examiner: 

The highest-performing students use literary terminology and respond to literary features, but focus on exploring effects and commenting on how they shape meaning

Wider Reading - Poetry - The Story So Far

Check out the Prezi to revise the poems we studied before Christmas...

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Dear English Literature students
Please follow this blog for your revision and check out the latest page on Past Examination Questions, which includes all the questions ever set on the A2 Reading for Meaning paper.

The wonderful Jeanette Winterson

You now need to be building up your own bank of quotations from your wider reading which you can pull out at the drop of a hat. At the English Literature conference today, Jeanette Winterson, author of 'Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit' (which she wrote when she was 24 and published in .....), 'The Passion' set in 18th Century Venice, 'Sexing the Cherry', 'Written On the Body' and, since opening her own vegetable shop and tiring of fruity titles, most recently, 'Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?', made lots of statements you could quote in your essays, both for your exam and for coursework.


Here are a few:

On love and relationships:

"All of life is about relationships .. and the heart of relationships is love."

"The love you experience early on in life becomes a template for what love is to you."

"You are the upgrade generation. Why stay with one partner when you can upgrade them like a phone?"

On literature:

"Reading gives you language - we can't reduce the world to karate-chop syntax - we live in a complex world and it needs the capacity for complex thought ... and to be articulate."

"Art encourages you to think wider, to put yourself in someone else's situation."

With 'Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit', I wanted to write my own Bible; if God can write the Bible, why can't I?"

For me, life is rich, and it's always opening up into a metaphor of some kind."

And perhaps not for your essays, but great thoughts, anyway:
On life in general:

"Life is propositional: nothing 'has' to be."

"How are we going to reorganise a global society... in a mixed world that has changed and will go on changing?"

"Economics is not a force of nature - people just make it up as they go along."

"Facts are misleading things; even more statistics."

"Everything that is outside of you can be taken away at any moment. Then ask yourself what would be left inside?"

On education:

"If you educated everybody, governments would be terrified."

Jeanette Winterson on Love in Literature

For some great thoughts and quotations on love in literature watch Jeanette Winterson, author of 'Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit' and 'Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?' (2012) at http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/bigscreen/tv/episode/b01p9b9c/. Particularly interesting from 40 mins .

Difference between form and structure

Always a tricky one, but it is essential that you are clear for your examination. Here is AQA's advice:

Form relates to the external shape of a text, determined by how it is presented on
paper, organised by stanzas/paragraphs, lines, syllables, rhyme, justification – best
thought of as a silhouette. It is a simpler thing to comment on because it is usually
visible.
Structure is more interesting because it goes beyond the visible – it is a matter of
the internal development and relationship between parts: structure is about the
internal skeleton and organs – best thought of as an X ray or CT scan, displaying the
organic relationship between ideas, feelings and attitudes within a text.
For example, the form of a sonnet is its 14 line length, its 8 line/6 line division and
its rhyme scheme. Within that form the structure may be 8 lines of description
leading to 6 lines of reflection, generalisation, resolution; or the mood may go from
neutral to sombre, or from sombre and resentful to acceptant.

Creative Writing Competition

Feeling creative? What about entering AQA's Creative Writing Competition at http://web.aqa.org.uk/becreative/about.php. Closing date 28th Feb 2013.