Easter Work

Below are questions from a past paper. I would like you to attempt BOTH the 1b and COMPARE question. This should take no longer than 1 hour 30 minutes

RULES

Answer ONE 1b question and ONE BIG COMPARE QUESTION
Spend 30 mins on 1b and 1hr on the BIG COMPARE
Whatever text you choose for 1b CANNOT be used in your response to the BIG COMPARE QUESTION
You MUST have your books with you to help

HELP

For the BIG COMPARE QUESTION you are simply required to write 3 mini essays (so roughly 20 minutes on each), there is no need to compare.

Section 1b 30 mins 21 marks answer ONE of the following

How far do you agree that the Patriot and the Pied Piper are heroes?


It has been said that a fault of the poem is the over-emphasised moral at the end.
 How satisfying do you find the poem's moral that "He prayeth well, who loveth well/
Both man and bird and beast"?


"Illusory as it is, Gatsby's dream gives meaning and value to human experience."
 How do you respond to this view?


THE BIG COMPARE QUESTIONS 42 marks use your remaining THREE texts to answer this question

EITHER 19

Many narratives have one or more significant moments of crisis.

Write about the significance of crises in the work of the three writers you have

studied. (42 marks)

OR 20

How do writers use repetition to create meanings in their texts?

In your answer, refer to the work of the three writers you have studied.

(42 marks)

 

The Road Rat - Updated

The Road - Clip 1 by dreadcentral



This homework needs to be on your blog by NEXT WEDNESDAY 1st APRIL

UPDATE

Some questions to consider and answer

• What element of forshadowing is employed in this section and why? (pg 62)
• What does the description of the men teach us about them? (Characterisation pg 62-3)
• McCarthy uses a simile when describing the truck 'Lumbering and creaking like a ship'. Why does he do this?
• Why does Mccarthy describe the Road Rat in such detail? (Characterisation pg 65)
• Why is the Road Rats character so explicit whilst the man is so implicit?
• What do we learn about the man through his exchanges with the Road Rat? (Pg 68. Consider the Man's impressive medical knowledge, look at the description of the grabbing of the boy and the shooting of the Road Rat)
• "A single round left in the revolver. You will not face the truth. You will not" Who is the man echoing here? How do you believe these words are uttered?
• Why don't the other men chase after the boy and the man following the shooting? (there are clues on pg 73-4).
• It is not until page 77 that the man finally cleans the "gore" and "dead mans brains" from the boys face. Why? (Be aware that in the intervening pages he has kept him warm with blankets, fed him etc yet not cleaned his face)

A Limited Palette

Cormac McCarthy writes with a limited palette in The Road, like a painter choosing a restricted range of colours. Certain adjectives crop up repeatedly, for instance, ‘gray’ and ‘ashen’. The dialogue often follows a similar pattern, ending with the father asking the boy if he’s ‘okay’ and the boy responding ‘okay.’ The sentence structures are also often highly repetitive, with simple and compound sentences being used rather than complex ones.
Here are some possible literary analyses of why this limited palette might have been chosen by the writer.


1. Choose those you most agree with and find examples from the text to illustrate the analysis being made.

1. The limited linguistic palette and repetitive techniques echo the monotony of the post-apocalyptic world that is described.
   
2. The repetitive language echoes the idea of being on a road, constantly travelling.
   
3. The death of everything living – plants, trees, creatures and most other human beings – is evoked through the bleakness and ‘deadness’ of the language.
   
4. There is a powerfully poetic effect in the simplicity of the language. By avoiding rhetorical flourishes and elaborate language the writer makes a stronger impact.
   
5. The pared down language of the narrative reflects the pared down life the characters have to live – essentials only.
   
6. Avoiding emotional language and keeping it simple makes the narrative all the more emotionally engaging.
   
7. The limited palette makes the story more universal, a fable for all time, rather than pinning it down with lots of elaborate details describing specific places.
   
8. There’s something rather dulling about the style that makes it hard to read and difficult to distinguish one part of the book from the next. All the events seem to merge together.
   
9. Lack of hyperbolic language highlights the extremity of the situation.
   

A Limited Palette?


It’s easy to oversimplify when talking about a writer’s style and although Cormac McCarthy is known for the spareness of his prose, there are also moments of rich lyricism in The Road.

1. Have a look again at the opening page of the novel, where the man is described waking from a dream. Phrases like the following are full of figurative language and poetic vocabulary: ‘Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast.’ Dreams and moments of waking seem to be evoked in this more lush language.
   
2. Find other examples of this in the novel.
   
3. Can you think of other instances where the language is of a different kind? Find examples and explain what the qualities of the language are and why you think language is being used in this way.
   
4. Look again at the literary analysis statements above. Either re-write one of these analytical statements or draft your own to reflect your discoveries about the variations in McCarthy’s prose style.

The ‘Woman’

Both critics and readers have commented on the small part the woman plays in the novel, particularly in comparison with the 2009 film adaptation. Looking at the bald statistics of word occurrences appears to confirm the marginal role of the woman:
1. As a class, brainstorm as many ideas as possible about why this might be. The woman is mentioned in the following passages:
p.17: From daydreams on the road there was no waking .... Freeze this frame. Now call down your dark and your cold and be damned.
p.54: The clocks stopped at 1:17. ... What is happening?
p.56: He thought about the picture in the road ... You mean you wish that you were dead.
p.57: What in God’s name are you talking about? We’re not survivors. We’re the walking dead in a horror film ... The one thing I can tell you is that you wont survive for yourself.
p.60: She was gone and the coldness of it was her final gift ... wrapped his son in a towel.

Woman: 14

Mother: 2

Mom: 1

Wife: 1

Man: 184

Father: 23

Papa: 135

After Reading – The ‘Woman’
2. Look back at the extracts in the context in which they appear in the novel. Use a mindmap to develop your analysis and speculative thoughts about the presence (and absence) of the woman in the novel. Headings you might use include:

• –  The context in which the woman is mentioned
  
• –  Representation
  
• –  Thematic functions
  
• –  Symbolic functions
  
• –  Structural functions
  
• –  Possible reasons for absence.
  In his interview, Adam Roberts, talking about the handling of time, goes on to explore the possible reasons for McCarthy’s ‘sparing’ use of the woman.
  [In the film] his wife appears in dream sequences, memory and flashback much more frequently than she does in the book. In the book he uses her very sparingly. I think that’s because he doesn’t want to mess up the very carefully denuded sense of time passing that things have come to an end, are at a standstill by giving too strong a sense that there’s a before and after, too strong a sense of chronological contiguity.
  Rather than assume her absence is a mistake or failing on McCarthy’s part, Roberts develops an interpretation which sees the woman’s presence (and absence) as a fundamental aspect of the novel. The statements below suggest six further interpretations of the mother and the function she fulfils.
  

3. In pairs, take each of the statements below and test it out. Does it chime with your own view? Or does it open up a new interpretation to you? Does it stand up to scrutiny? Or can you see flaws in the reading of the novel on which it depends?
   
4. Draw on the readings to draft your own exploratory analysis of the woman.
   

1	This is a novel less about survival than about the relationship between a father and his son.
2	McCarthy needed something that is no longer present to represent life as it used to be in the time before.
3	The man and woman represent the different ways in which humanity might react to such a situation.
4	This is a novel about minute by minute survival. Showing the man resisting the temptation of his memories brings this home to the reader.
5	The woman has a powerful and ambiguous symbolic function in the novel: she represents both the giving of life and the temptation of death.
6	There is no space in this pared back narrative of survival for a third main character.
7	The vulnerability of the boy would seem far less evident if his mother were there as well.
8	For the man, the woman’s absence is a constant reminder of the alternative to struggling to survive.

The Road 30 minute homework

Due in Wednesday March 25

How does McCarthy tell the story in pages 1-28 of The Road?

You can choose to type directly onto your blog or handwrite and upload an image to your blog.

Post-Apocalyptic Literature

This work needs to be added to your blog by Wednesday March 26th


The Road belongs to a tradition known as post-apocalyptic literature. Post-apocalyptic narratives are set after some devastating event has occurred which has destroyed the fabric of society. This might be anything from nuclear war, terrorism, biological warfare or industrial disaster to disease, climate change or technological meltdown. In some cases the event which has brought about such devastation might never be specified. In some examples,
the whole of the narrative takes place after the apocalyptic event; in others, the narrative recounts the time before the disaster, the event itself and the period which follows.
Here are 10 observations on the features, themes and functions of post-apocalyptic fiction.

1. In pairs, read the observations in relation to your interpretation of The Road, ticking those which seem particularly to apply to, or in some way illuminate, McCarthy’s novel. Mark any which do not seem to be relevant with a cross. In each case, make a few notes explaining your decisions.
   
2. Share your ideas in class discussion.
   

1.	Protected bastions of humanity in a sea of inhospitable waste or wilderness or danger, such as enclosed cities, underground caverns, and bunkers.
2.	Marauding gangs of bandits.
3.	‘Apocalypse’ derives from the Greek word for ‘revelation’.
4.	Fall of civilization.
5.	Mythologizing of the past.
6.	The thoughts and actions of the survivors are what counts.
7.	Humanity has always imagined its own destruction. Each generation believes the end is somewhere round the corner, and our catastrophic fantasies are a good barometer of what’s currently troubling us.
8.	Post-apocalyptic novels are a dark, bleak and often illuminating genre.
9.	Punishment for our wicked overreaching.
10.	A chaotic dark age, in which robber bands, bizarre millenarian religious sects, nomads, hunters and foragers of all sorts are found. The remains of the industrial society – its rotting industrial plants, its collapsed cities – litter the landscape, archaeology rather than evidence of recent catastrophe.

The Good Guys

Jaz and Ellie are the good guys. Look at their blogs, they carry the fire.

They squatted in the road and ate cold rice and cold beans that they'd cooked days ago. Already beginning to ferment. No place to make a fire that would not be seen. They slept huddled together in the rank quilts in the dark and the cold. He held their work close to him. So thin. My heart, he said. My heart. But he knew that if he were a good teacher still it might well be as she had said. That the two blogs were all that stood between him and death. (44.1)

Some existentialism for you

What does it mean to be alive in a dead world?

The Beginning and the End HOMEWORK DUE WEDNESDAY 18th (on blogs)

The Beginning
In an article on novel beginnings, the novelist Blake Morrison writes: 

‘Gabriel Garcia Marquez has said that he sometimes spends months on a first paragraph, since it’s there that the theme, style and tone of a book are defined – solve that and the rest comes easily.’ 

In In pairs, talk about how far the opening paragraph of The Road (from ‘When he woke in the woods in the dark’ to ‘loped soundlessly into the dark.’) defines the novel it introduces.

The Opening Section – a Homework Task
1. On your own, re-read the first 28 pages, pulling out anything you think is a key feature of the novel, for example aspects of sentence structure, imagery, the handling of narrative and chronological time, the pattern of a conversation and so on. 

Key features of pages 1-28	Example

2. Choose two or three of these features that you think are developed interestingly throughout the rest of the novel. Explore the ways in which McCarthy uses the particular feature and the significance it takes on.

Your blogs and those students to be given obsidian

On the right hand side of this blog are links to your classmates work

The following students have not completed their homework or set up their blogs, they will not be permitted to lessons until they have.

THE BAD GUYS

Cameron

Lucy

William

 Eleanor

Erin

Lilika

Bryani

Charlotte

Lies, damned lies and statistics

Someone (not I) has tracked the frequency with which certain words appear in the novel.

after (45) ago (17) back (252) before (45) beyond (45) blackened (19), blanket (193) could (189) down (244) fire (136) man (193) okay (195) rain (44) sorry (27) time (100) water (109)

In what ways does this statistical information strengthen, or cause you to question, your thinking about The Road?

Quotations - expectations

It is essential you recognise Cormac McCarthy's crafting of sentences in "The Road". Read the following extract out loud, pay attention to the sounds of the words and the rhythm of the writing.

This is my child, he said. I wash a dead man's brains out of his hair. That is my job.

Yes I am, he said. I am the one.

Tomatoes, peaches, beans, apricots. Canned hams. Corned beef.

Are we still the good guys, he said.

We should go, Papa, he said. Yes, the man said. But he didn't.

The snow fell nor did it cease to fall.

Okay? Okay.

They sat on the edge of the tub and pulled their shoes on and them he handed the boy the pan and soap and he took the stove and the little bottle of gas and the pistol and wrapped in their blankets and they went back across the yard to the bunker.

Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth.

She was gone and the coldness of it was her final gift. 

What does these extracts tells us about;

- the type of novel it might be (the genre/s it seems to draw on or fit with)
- the story (what might happen)
- themes (the ideas it might raise)
- characters and relationships
- the way the story might be told.

What the novel makes me think of

To help you get started with your own blog HMWK for Friday March 13th

As you read The Road you will come across some key episodes

- coming across the man who has been struck by lightening (pp. 50-53)
- shooting the 'roadrat' (pp. 62-69)
- finding the cellar of naked and mutilated people (pp. 112-121)
- the baby on the spit (pp. 210-215)
- getting to the shore (pp. 227 - 230)
- the theft of the man and boy's belongings (pp. 270-278)

Remember to write about 

How the episode impacted on you?
What was the writer doing to evoke this response?
Plot progression (what will happen next?)
Your experience (change of mood? A ligher moment? Increase or release of tension?)
How does this develop character and their relationship?
The techniques employed by McCarthy. Is the language in keeping with the rest of the novel? Are there particular symbols or images that are foregrounded?
Is this in fact a key episode? What makes it important? How does it stand out in a novel without chapters or chapter titles?

What it also makes me think of

Welcome to The Road

You should have read the novel once over the Christmas break and again over half term, you will need to read the novel at least twice more during the spring/summer term to ensure you know the story inside out. Simply re-reading doesn't aid your understanding, you need to track key events in the novel.

In order to do this you need to set up your own individual blog and email me a link to it. On it you MUST have:

WEEK 1 TASKS - DEADLINE FRIDAY

Complete today's TASK on the expectations we have from the quotations I have supplied you with (help with this can be found in last years blogs which are located on the right)

Create a post for you 5 + 5 = 1. This should be 5 sentences summarising what you have learnt so far, 5 words (one for each sentence) which summarise those sentences and finally one word to explain everything you've learnt so far.

Create a post with images which remind you of the novel

Watch this video whilst you work