Interpretations of prose and poetry

1. Interpretations of prose and poetry Learning Outcome: By the end of the lesson we will be able to discuss the expectations of the examiner for this module.

2. What is the module worth?

3. How will the module be assessed? • You will complete an exam that lasts for 2 hours and 45 minutes. • The exam is made up of two sections: Section A: Unseen section Section B: Analytical essay on set texts

4. Section A • This section is worth 40 marks. • You should spend about an hour on this section. • You will be expected to select either a piece of prose or a piece of poetry that you haven’t seen before and respond to it. • You will be expected to explore how the writer uses language, structure and form to create their meaning.

5. Section B • This section is worth 60 marks. • You will select a question to answer based on the texts that you have studied: ‘Captain Corelli’s Mandolin’, ‘The Great Gatsby’ and ‘Rapture’. • The question will be a comment made by a reader. You will have to respond to that comment referencing at least two of the three books that you have studied. • The question will be based on relationships.

6. What does context mean?

7. The best answers will…

9. AO3 AO1 • AO2 • AO4

12. What are the connotations of Relationships

13. Louis De Bernieres Dr Iannis had enjoyed a satisfactory day in which none of his patients had died or got any worse. He had attended a surprisingly easy calving, lanced one abscess, extracted a molar, dosed one lady of easy virtue with Salvarsan, performed an unpleasant but spectacularly fruitful enema, and had produced a miracle by a feat of medical prestidigitation. He chuckled to himself, for no doubt this miracle was already being touted as worthy of St Gerasimos himself. He had gone to old man Stamatis' house, having been summoned to deal with an earache, and had found himself gazing down into an aural orifice more dank, be-lichened, and stalagmitic even than the Drogarati cave. What do we learn from the opening of this text?

14. F. Scott Fitzgerald In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. “Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,” he told me, “just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.” He didn’t say any more, but we’ve always been unusually communicative in a reserved way, and I understood that he meant a great deal more than that. In consequence, I’m inclined to reserve all judgments, a habit that has opened up many curious natures to me and also made me the victim of not a few veteran bores. The abnormal mind is quick to detect and attach itself to this quality when it appears in a normal person, and so it came about that in college I was unjustly accused of being a politician, because I was privy to the secret griefs of wild, unknown men. Most of theconfidences were unsought — frequently I have feigned sleep, preoccupation, or a hostile levity when I realized by some unmistakable sign that an intimate revelation was quivering on the horizon; for the intimate revelations of young men, or at least the terms in which they express them, are usually plagiaristic and marred by obvious suppressions.

15. Thinking about the two texts • In what ways are the two texts similar? • In what ways are the two texts different? • Which in your opinion is the most engaging opening?

16. The best answers will…

17. Compare how the openings of the two texts reveal character (AO3)

18. How – in what different ways You might consider in your answer: The language used The type of narrator Relationships with other characters Description of actions

19. The context of ‘The Great Gatsby’ Learning Outcome: By the end of the lesson we will be able to discuss our understanding of the historical context and consider how this will impact upon the way in which the text is written. (AO4)

21. The Twenties Often referred to as: • ‘The Roaring Twenties’ • ‘The Golden Age’ • ‘The Jazz Age’ What is the significance of each of these titles? What do they reveal to us about life in the twenties?

22. Why ‘The Roaring Twenties? • Refers to a period of economic prosperity • Refers to developments in technology – television and film, music, dance, telephones, cars, aviation and electricity. • Refers to massive growth of industry and industrial areas. • Refers to change in treatment off women – independence – ‘flapper’ • Refers to change in social interests – rise of the ‘celebrity’

23. ‘The Roaring Twenties’ Vs. ‘The Lost Generation’ • ‘The Lost Generation’ was a phrase coined by Gertrude Stein to describe the people who grew up in the period after World War I. • Lots of the literature written during this period depicts characters who have a reckless urge to seek pleasure as a way to cope with (or compensate for) the feelings of loss and their overarching sense of the futility of life.

24. Consider: Which term is most fitting for ‘The Great Gatsby’? • Does Fitzgerald focus on the positive or negative aspects of life? • Which social groups is he most interested in portraying within this text? • What comments is he trying to make about society and how does he want the reader to feel towards the characters that he portrays?

25. Analysing language • You have 5 min’s to discuss the ways in which a person can be ‘great’. Try to come up with at least 5 ideas!

26. How will the context affect our view of ‘greatness’?

27. Why do you think the novel is called The ‘Great’ Gatsby?

28. How has the context affected the way in which the text is written?

29. What have we learned In today’s lesson? Why have we learned it?

30. Daisy and Tom Buchanan Learning Outcome: By the end of the lesson we will be able to analyse Fitzgerald’s use of language and discuss how this reveals character to the reader (AO2)

31. What have we learned so far about the way that the context has affected the way that the novel is written?

32. Why do you think the novel is called The ‘Great’ Gatsby?

33. Analysing the presentation of character For the extract that you are given consider: • What Fitzgerald is revealing about the character at the beginning of the novel – and how this is achieved. • Using the benefit of hindsight – how does this extract foreshadow later events?

34. Tom I drove over there to have dinner with the Tom Buchanans. Daisy was my second cousin once removed and I’d known Tom in college. And just after the war I spent two days with them in Chicago. Her husband, among various physical accomplishments, had been one of the most powerful ends that ever played football at New Haven—a national figure in a way, one of those men who reach such an acute limited excellence at twenty-one that everything afterward savors of anti-climax. His family were enormously wealthy—even in college his freedom with money was a matter for reproach—but now he’d left Chicago and come east in a fashion that rather took your breath away: for instance he’d brought down a string of polo ponies from Lake Forest. It was hard to realize that a man in my own generation was wealthy enough to do that.

35. He had changed since his New Haven years. Now he was a sturdy, straw haired man of thirty with a rather hard mouth and a supercilious manner. Two shining, arrogant eyes had established dominance over his face and gave him the appearance of always leaning aggressively forward. Not even the effeminate swank of his riding clothes could hide the enormous power of that body—he seemed to fill those glistening boots until he strained the top lacing and you could see a great pack of muscle shifting when his shoulder moved under his thin coat. It was a body capable of enormous leverage—a cruel body. His speaking voice, a gruff husky tenor, added to the impression of fractiousness he conveyed. There was a touch of paternal contempt in it, even toward people he liked—and there were men at New Haven who had hated his guts.

36. Daisy The other girl, Daisy, made an attempt to rise—she leaned slightly forward with a conscientious expression— then she laughed, an absurd, charming little laugh, and I laughed too and came forward into the room. ‘I’m p-paralyzed with happiness.’ She laughed again, as if she said something very witty, and held my hand for a moment, looking up into my face, promising that there was no one in the world she so much wanted to see. That was a way she had. She hinted in a murmur that the surname of the balancing girl was Baker. (I’ve heard it said that Daisy’s murmur was only to make people lean toward her; an irrelevant criticism that made it no less charming.)

37. I looked back at my cousin who began to ask me questions in her low, thrilling voice. It was the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again. Her face was sad and lovely with bright things in it, bright eyes and a bright passionate mouth—but there was an excitement in her voice that men who had cared for her found difficult to forget: a singing compulsion, a whispered ‘Listen,’ a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour.

38. The relationship between Tom and Daisy – Chapter One Learning Outcome: By the end of the lesson we will be able to demonstrate our understanding of the characters within written responses (AO1)

39. Knowledge of Chapter 1 • Where does Nick move from and why? • What job has he come to do? • Where does Nick live at the beginning of the text? • How does Nick know Daisy and Tom? • Who else does he meet in the first chapter and what is his opinion of them?

40. Group feedback from Tom and Daisy extracts

41. ……a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless. Instead of being the warm center of the world the middle-west now seemed like the ragged edge of the universe.

42. The Buchanans Why they came east I don’t know. They had spent a year in France, for no particular reason, and then drifted here and there unrestfully wherever people played polo and were rich together. How does their lifestyle contrast with Nick’s?

43. Introducing Tomand DaisyFor each of the characters, list the adverbs used about their actions from pgs 12-25 Daisy Tom Restlessly • What impression do you get of each character from the list attributed to them?

44. ‘Well, she was less than an hour old and Tom was God knows where. I woke up out of the ether with an utterly abandoned feeling and asked the nurse right away if it was a boy or a girl. She told me it was a girl, and so I turned my head away and wept. ‘All right,’ I said, ‘I’m glad it’s a girl. And I hope she’ll be a fool—that’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool.’ What does the quote reveal to us about Daisy and her relationship with Tom?

45. Daisy and Tom By the end of chapter one – what impression do we have of the relationship between Tom and Daisy Buchanan? What do you think that Fitzgerald is trying to say through his presentation of their relationship? How does the presentation of their relationship fit/ disagree with what we know about the time period that the book is set in?

46. Chapter Two By the end of the lesson we will be able to analyse the methods used to present the characters of Daisy and Myrtle and discuss how these methods reflect the writer’s purpose.

47. Knowledge of Chapter Two • What is the name of Tom’s mistress? • What does Tom buy for his mistress? • Why do they have a disagreement before the end of Chapter Two?

48. Myrtle Wilson Vs Daisy Buchanan

50. But above the grey land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The eyes of Doctor T. J.Eckleburgare blue and gigantic—their retinas are one yard high. They look out of no face but, instead, from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a nonexistentnose. Evidently some wild wag of an oculist set them there to fatten his practice in the borough of Queens, and then sank down himself into eternal blindness or forgot them and moved away. But his eyes, dimmed a little by many paintless days under sun and rain, brood on over the solemn dumping ground.