English Language and Literature (spec B)
May. 25th, 2004 10:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ravenFirst of all - Hannah, my love, my darling, light of my life (do you think we ought to see other people?), I'm sorry. So sorry. Fundamentally sorry from the core of my being, down on my knees in apology, holding up these couch cushions - much as they did in Biblical times! - as a symbol of my sorrow and regret. I'm sorry. Please forgive me.
Moving on. English. Thank you so much for all the good luck wishes. They came in very handy, especially as things didn't start well, with trains being cancelled all over the place and my being distinctly afraid I wouldn't get into school at all. But I did reach there, which may nor may not have been a good thing, and had time for a cheese pasty and small bowl of strawberries and cream before one o'clock.
English exams take forever to get started, because the English department need to get round everyone and frisk their anthologies. I never annotate mine too much, so I was okay; but I can't remember a time when anyone's actually had their anthology taken away from them. It would be unspeakably cruel, I must say. Besides, by this point, your anthology is a safety net. It's battered and scribbled on and has been being mistreated since September, but it's yours. Mine is the AQA/NEAB anthology, and it's purple and has a shiny cover. Small things make exam candidates happy.
The first module was the more difficult one - they give you an hour and a half to write two essays, one on the poetry and one on the prose. The poetry one came first and it was awful. It really was. The question was, "How do poets evoke memory?" and the given poem was the one I was talking about a few days ago, In Which The Ancient History I Learn Is Not My Own, from Eavan Boland (In a Time of Violence). As I said then, I adore that poem but find it nigh on impossible to write about. They wanted you to compare with one other poem. It would have been a good question if any of the poems were actually about memory. In the end, I plumped for Them & [uz] (Tony Harrison), because it does have some past tense in it, and scribbled.
Looking back, I know I wrote rubbish. Complete tripe, and unstructured, badly-thought-out tripe at that. As I was saying to Hannah before, this course is slightly different from most English courses. It isn't a linguistics course, where you talk about gender and power and all that; nor is it a literature course with contrasting themes and all that. Instead, the focus is conveyed attitudes, values and ideas, and the way language is used to bring them across. In fact, if anyone remembers the DVD commentary meme where everyone took their fics and worked their way through them explaining how and why they wrote what they wrote, my English course is exactly like that. We are told to write almost in points - make a point, give an exemplifying quote, and finish with a comment, ie:
"In 'In which the Ancient History...' (Eavan Boland), the poet conveys a sense of memory by her use of stylistic devices that bring to mind the voice of a child. Her use of assonance in "wooden batten on... knotted cotton" echoes the rhythmic chanting of childhood, thus conveying the idea that her current attitudes and values were formed when she was a child."
Etc, etc. A load of tripe, as I said. Most of my points were like that - irrelevant, tautological and difficult to follow. And they followed no logical pattern.
Moving on. The second essay was far better. This time, the question was: "How do writers persaude/influence an audience?" Easy, GCSE stuff almost. I didn't pick the Christian Brothers Prospectus like most people did, mainly because I hate it and can't write about it, and instead chose Francis Bacon's essay Of Studies and an extract from The Water Babies by Charles Kingsley, called, fittingly enough, The Examiner-of-all-Examiners. Bacon is very fond of pontificating in triplicate ("Studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability") and like many minor Victorian classics, The Water Babies has a distinctly moralising tone to it. I wrote happily about Latin rhetoric and subtextual persuasion, and while it still wasn't a particularly elegant piece of writing, hopefully it served its purpose.
The second module, only one essay but still an hour and a half, followed immediately with no break. As an aside, I did pity those poor people who got extra time. I believe they got an extra fifteen minutes per hour, meaning they were in the hall for nearly four hours. Urgh. Three hours was bad enough.
The second module, as I was saying, involves discussing the use of linguistic devices in Utopia and Brave New World. It's a closed book exam, but that's not much of a hardship, as they give you two extracts to discuss and ask you to put them in context and nothing more. And the question is the same every year, only the extracts change, and I felt like I'd written this self-same essay hundreds of times before. Which can only be a good thing, I suppose, and I filled my answer book down to the last line, something I'd never done before.
But by quarter past four, I was just about sick of writing. I worked out I must have written in excess of twelve sides. Urgh. I was in dreamy, hyper-observant mode as they collected in the papers, and noticed that the first thing everyone does as they stand up is pull their tails straight. Mine managed to twist themselves round into an impossible position while I was sitting there, and it's apparently a universal phenomenon.
I made my way home through the sunshine quite safe in the knowledge that I have finished with AS English. Coursework was one module; these two exams were the others. There. Done.
My next exams are on the eighth, ninth and tenth of June. Which gives me about two weeks of study leave and revision for Chemistry, Biology and Politics. Yay, etc.
Moving on. English. Thank you so much for all the good luck wishes. They came in very handy, especially as things didn't start well, with trains being cancelled all over the place and my being distinctly afraid I wouldn't get into school at all. But I did reach there, which may nor may not have been a good thing, and had time for a cheese pasty and small bowl of strawberries and cream before one o'clock.
English exams take forever to get started, because the English department need to get round everyone and frisk their anthologies. I never annotate mine too much, so I was okay; but I can't remember a time when anyone's actually had their anthology taken away from them. It would be unspeakably cruel, I must say. Besides, by this point, your anthology is a safety net. It's battered and scribbled on and has been being mistreated since September, but it's yours. Mine is the AQA/NEAB anthology, and it's purple and has a shiny cover. Small things make exam candidates happy.
The first module was the more difficult one - they give you an hour and a half to write two essays, one on the poetry and one on the prose. The poetry one came first and it was awful. It really was. The question was, "How do poets evoke memory?" and the given poem was the one I was talking about a few days ago, In Which The Ancient History I Learn Is Not My Own, from Eavan Boland (In a Time of Violence). As I said then, I adore that poem but find it nigh on impossible to write about. They wanted you to compare with one other poem. It would have been a good question if any of the poems were actually about memory. In the end, I plumped for Them & [uz] (Tony Harrison), because it does have some past tense in it, and scribbled.
Looking back, I know I wrote rubbish. Complete tripe, and unstructured, badly-thought-out tripe at that. As I was saying to Hannah before, this course is slightly different from most English courses. It isn't a linguistics course, where you talk about gender and power and all that; nor is it a literature course with contrasting themes and all that. Instead, the focus is conveyed attitudes, values and ideas, and the way language is used to bring them across. In fact, if anyone remembers the DVD commentary meme where everyone took their fics and worked their way through them explaining how and why they wrote what they wrote, my English course is exactly like that. We are told to write almost in points - make a point, give an exemplifying quote, and finish with a comment, ie:
"In 'In which the Ancient History...' (Eavan Boland), the poet conveys a sense of memory by her use of stylistic devices that bring to mind the voice of a child. Her use of assonance in "wooden batten on... knotted cotton" echoes the rhythmic chanting of childhood, thus conveying the idea that her current attitudes and values were formed when she was a child."
Etc, etc. A load of tripe, as I said. Most of my points were like that - irrelevant, tautological and difficult to follow. And they followed no logical pattern.
Moving on. The second essay was far better. This time, the question was: "How do writers persaude/influence an audience?" Easy, GCSE stuff almost. I didn't pick the Christian Brothers Prospectus like most people did, mainly because I hate it and can't write about it, and instead chose Francis Bacon's essay Of Studies and an extract from The Water Babies by Charles Kingsley, called, fittingly enough, The Examiner-of-all-Examiners. Bacon is very fond of pontificating in triplicate ("Studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability") and like many minor Victorian classics, The Water Babies has a distinctly moralising tone to it. I wrote happily about Latin rhetoric and subtextual persuasion, and while it still wasn't a particularly elegant piece of writing, hopefully it served its purpose.
The second module, only one essay but still an hour and a half, followed immediately with no break. As an aside, I did pity those poor people who got extra time. I believe they got an extra fifteen minutes per hour, meaning they were in the hall for nearly four hours. Urgh. Three hours was bad enough.
The second module, as I was saying, involves discussing the use of linguistic devices in Utopia and Brave New World. It's a closed book exam, but that's not much of a hardship, as they give you two extracts to discuss and ask you to put them in context and nothing more. And the question is the same every year, only the extracts change, and I felt like I'd written this self-same essay hundreds of times before. Which can only be a good thing, I suppose, and I filled my answer book down to the last line, something I'd never done before.
But by quarter past four, I was just about sick of writing. I worked out I must have written in excess of twelve sides. Urgh. I was in dreamy, hyper-observant mode as they collected in the papers, and noticed that the first thing everyone does as they stand up is pull their tails straight. Mine managed to twist themselves round into an impossible position while I was sitting there, and it's apparently a universal phenomenon.
I made my way home through the sunshine quite safe in the knowledge that I have finished with AS English. Coursework was one module; these two exams were the others. There. Done.
My next exams are on the eighth, ninth and tenth of June. Which gives me about two weeks of study leave and revision for Chemistry, Biology and Politics. Yay, etc.
