Context-arama (this is getting worse)

Hello all,
Just a quick catch up. On Monday we:
- discussed the idea of what context meant in relation to literature, and tried to describe a variety of contexts which we applied to EL. We considered scientific, religious, cultural and literary contexts to have particular relevance to our study, and on Friday will look at how we might be able to ensure that our response to question 1b shows an understanding and appreciation of this. I'll try to get your essays from Friday marked in time, although this will involve me using the dreaded pen...
See you then,
Mr Boulter

The beginning is simple to markscheme...

Hello all,
As the horribly forced title of this post indicates, Monday's lesson will involve having a look at the sample markscheme provided by the exam board for this unit and making sure we understand the assessment criteria before planning and having a go at a Section A style essay on one of the chapters from EL. The markscheme document from the AQA website is available here: http://store.aqa.org.uk/qual/gce/pdf/AQA-LITB1-W-SMS-07.PDF .
Finally, you might be interested in buying this text from Amazon: it's a set of notes to accompany each chapter and is actually pretty thought-provoking and useful. There's no substitute for doing your own re-reading, note making and revision, but this text asks some interesting questions...and it's only £3.75! http://www.amazon.co.uk/level-Notes-McEwans-Enduring-Gibsons/dp/0954652002
See you tomorrow,
Mr Boulter
ps thanks to all those who've emailed me chapter summaries or essays - unfortunately our school email system seems to have conked out again this weekend, so I'm not currently able to forward them on... I'll get on it next week.

Monday's lesson time

Hi again.
OK- I've emailed you a copy of two articles which have relevance to EL. One is a student essay response (I showed you the title on Friday) and the other is a comparison of narrative endings in EL and The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood. Don't worry if you haven't read the Atwood (although you really should), the article is still useful. Can I ask that:

- Sasha, Rachel, Laura, Georgina read the student response
- Ellie, Tom, James, Rachael A read the endings article

You can read the other as well if you like, but most importantly, you need to prepare a short summary of the main points and be ready to explain them to the other half of the class.

As well as this, I'd like you all to log on the emagazine (instructions on an earlier blog post, so just look back and find out how). You need to open the emagazine edition 42 and read the article on Keats entitled "Sweetmeats and roses? Cruel women in Keats' poetry." which is on page 59. You may well find it better to print this out rather than reading it off screen, in fact, do print it out as it would be good to have it in the next lesson. I've emalied you a couple of articles on P and P for your interest, but there is also a very good one in emagazine edition 43 about narrative voice which I would recommend you read.

Have fun, email me if any problems with this and please make sure you are ready to discuss the reading in Friday's lesson.
Lovely day!
Mr Boulter
ps - do listen to the audio version of the Digested Read posted below - very funny!

Enduring Love in 4 mins???

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/mar/07/ian-mcewan

Thanks to Mr Marshall for providing this - well worth a look!
So - remember that your mini-Keats exam responses are due on Monday, but there won't actually be a lesson. Instead, I'm going to set you some work, involving you reading and annotating a couple of articles on the texts we've read: I'll post the details of this shortly.
Mr Boulter

Keats Essays

Hi-

Here are the Keats essays we discussed in class (or are about to!). You need to choose one of them and complete over the weekend please - this shouldn't take more than 30-40 mins - we'll go over approaches in class.

1. Compare the way any element of Aspects of Narrative (Scenes and Places, Time and Sequence, Characters and Characterisation, Voice, Point of View, Destination) are presented in 'Eve of St Agnes' and 'La Belle Dame Sans Merci'.
2. Look again at the first 46 lines if 'Lamia' and write about how Keats creates reader interest in the opening to his narrative.

Mr Boulter

ps- my original offspring was getting jealous of the new baby being on the internet - here's a picture of her which just about sums up her attitude to the new arrival!

it is a truth universally acknowledged...

.... that you need to have read Pride and Prejudice by March 20th - well actually, the 22nd - so that we can start work on it on the 24th. And you should recognise the heading of this post if you have started reading the book by now, which I hope you have.

Meanwhile, we have begun to draw together aspects of narrative in Auden's poems, before going on to look at the remaining three poems, and today talked about Auden's use of miniature dramatic scenarios rather than full-scale narratives in his lyric poems and ballads. We also talked about the way metaphorical layers of meaning are constructed differently in each of the four poems - from the myth-like narrative of 'O Where Are You Going?', which is set in a surreal nowhere-land, to the symbolic realism of 'O What is that Sound?' and 'As I Walked Out', and the philosophical monologue of 'I Would Tell You.' We also talked about the different use of the narrative voice in each of the four, and how these can create ambiguity by withholding information in certain ways.

Next up are Miss Gee and 1st September 1939 - and then, be warned, there'll be an essay.

Dr S

Friday

Hi all,

Just to confirm, I will be coming in for our lesson tomorrow, so please turn up! Please make sure you are ready to present at least some of your chapters. Baby doing well but nocturnal, so keeping us up all night!

Mr Boulter

Edward Peter Boulter!

Here he is, born

today at 4.56, weighing 8lb and in good health!

Monday

Hi all,

OK - although the baby still hasn't turned up (!) it's unlikely at this stage that I'll be in on Monday. However, Mr Marshall has kindly agreed to take the lesson, and will be taking you through the key narrative features of some of the chapters which we otherwise haven't got covered. The idea is that, whilst this will obviosuly be valuable in its own right, it will also act as a model for your own presentations. Thanks very much to Mr Marshall for coming up with this cunning plan!

One more thing - I've got an essay title that I'd like you to complete for the Keats poems, but it's on my email, and this is not currently working. As soon as I can, I'll post this with a deadline.

Thanks to all for an interesting lesson on Friday. If you weren't there, we used emagazine to watch the clips on use of dialogue and character. We then discussed these in relation to EL, considering the ways that, through Joe, McEwan presents dialogue to us in meticulous detail, explaining how words are delivered, and what the characters are doing whilst the dialogue is taking place. We used chapter 6 (I think) where Jed tells Joe that he loves him as a model for this, and discussed the way that Joe seems obsessed with detail, as if he is constantly trying to justify or prove the validity of his memory. We also looked at the opening of the chapter in the restaurant, where Joe admits that his memory can be fallible, and considered McEwan's blend of scientific and poetic language within Joe's narration, as he often applies poetic techniques such as imagery, alliteration etc, even when the content for his narration is scientific. There's a curious blend of the rational and the artistic present in Joe's narration here, evoking one of the central themes of the novel. An example which we looked at could be Joe's description of his apartment (can't remember the chapter and my book's at school!), in which he used an extended metaphor of his home as a ship, with a number of explicitly 'poetic' rhetorical flourishes being applied.

What else? We discussed the importance of the symbolism of the hot air balloon, in that it is man-made and demonstrably technological, but at the same time is controlled by fate and the elements to a large extent. Again, we thought this was apt as a symbol of the science vs the spiritual / artistic / emotional theme which we explored through Keats' work and which reoccurs here.

Mr Marshall - you had some interesting things to say about religious imagery in Joe's narration - I wonder if you might be able to summarise this and post it onto the blog? As soon as the email is working again, I'll send you the instructions as to how to do this. On this theme, there's a really interesting interview with McEwan and Richard Dawkins on You Tube here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7LjriWFAEs - might be worth having a look at. There's also some other interesting interviews with McEwan on there - great wider reading / watching.

Right, that's it, have a good lesson tomorrow and let me know how you got on - any of you are always free to comment or write a post for the blog if you would like!

Mr Boulter