IB English A: Literature Course Companion

306 Pages·2012·17.783 MB·English

by  Hannah Tyson, Mark Beverley

O X F O R D I B D I p l O m a p R O g R a m m e
E nglis h A :
liT E R AT U R E
COURSE COMPANION
Hannah Tyson
Mark Beverley
3
Poem ‘House by the Railroad, 1925,’ by Ernest Farres translated by Lawrence Venuti,
from Edward Hopper © 2006 Ernest Farres. Translation © 2009 by Lawrence Venuti.
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Carver reprinted by permission of Grove/Atlantic, Inc. “E.S.L.” from STARTING FROM SLEEP: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS by Charles F.
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Continued on page 300
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Course Companion definition
The IB Diploma Programme Course Companions profile and the IB Diploma Programme core
are resource materials designed to support requirements, theory of knowledge, the extended
students throughout their two-year Diploma essay, and creativity, action, service (CAS).
Programme course of study in a particular
Each book can be used in conjunction with other
subject. They will help students gain an
materials and indeed, students of the IB are
understanding of what is expected from the
required and encouraged to draw conclusions
study of an IB Diploma Programme subject
from a variety of resources. Suggestions for
while presenting content in a way that illustrates
additional and further reading are given in each
the purpose and aims of the IB. They reflect
book and suggestions for how to extend research
the philosophy and approach of the IB and
are provided.
encourage a deep understanding of each subject
by making connections to wider issues and In addition, the Course Companions provide
providing opportunities for critical thinking. advice and guidance on the specific course
assessment requirements and on academic honesty
The books mirror the IB philosophy of viewing
protocol. They are distinctive and authoritative
the curriculum in terms of a whole-course
without being prescriptive.
approach; the use of a wide range of resources,
international mindedness, the IB learner
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IB mission statement
The International Baccalaureate aims to develop develop challenging programmes of international
inquiring, knowledgable and caring young people education and rigorous assessment.
who help to create a better and more peaceful
These programmes encourage students across
world through intercultural understanding
the world to become active, compassionate, and
and respect.
lifelong learners who understand that other
To this end the IB works with schools, people, with their differences, can also be right.
governments and international organizations to
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The IB learner profile
The aim of all IB programmes is to develop Knowledgable They explore concepts, ideas,
internationally minded people who, recognizing and issues that have local and global significance.
their common humanity and shared guardianship In so doing, they acquire in-depth knowledge
of the planet, help to create a better and more and develop understanding across a broad and
peaceful world. IB learners strive to be: balanced range of disciplines.
Inquirers They develop their natural curiosity. Thinkers They exercise initiative in applying
They acquire the skills necessary to conduct thinking skills critically and creatively to recognize
inquiry and research and show independence in and approach complex problems, and make
learning. They actively enjoy learning and this love reasoned, ethical decisions.
of learning will be sustained throughout their lives.
Communicators They understand and Caring They show empathy, compassion, and
express ideas and information confidently and respect towards the needs and feelings of others.
creatively in more than one language and in a They have a personal commitment to service, and
variety of modes of communication. They work act to make a positive difference to the lives of
effectively and willingly in collaboration with others and to the environment.
others.
Risk-takers They approach unfamiliar situations
Principled They act with integrity and honesty, and uncertainty with courage and forethought,
with a strong sense of fairness, justice, and and have the independence of spirit to explore
respect for the dignity of the individual, groups, new roles, ideas, and strategies. They are brave
and communities. They take responsibility for and articulate in defending their beliefs.
their own actions and the consequences that
Balanced They understand the importance of
accompany them.
intellectual, physical, and emotional balance to
Open-minded They understand and appreciate achieve personal well-being for themselves and
their own cultures and personal histories, and are others.
open to the perspectives, values, and traditions
Reflective They give thoughtful consideration
of other individuals and communities. They are
to their own learning and experience. They are
accustomed to seeking and evaluating a range of
able to assess and understand their strengths and
points of view, and are willing to grow from the
limitations in order to support their learning and
experience.
personal development.
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A note on academic honesty
It is of vital importance to acknowledge and Bibliographies should include a formal list of
appropriately credit the owners of information the resources that you used in your work. ‘Formal’
when that information is used in your work. means that you should use one of the several
After all, owners of ideas (intellectual property) accepted forms of presentation. This usually involves
have property rights. To have an authentic piece separating the resources that you use into different
of work, it must be based on your individual categories (e.g. books, magazines, newspaper articles,
and original ideas with the work of others fully Internet-based resources, CDs and works of art) and
acknowledged. Therefore, all assignments, written providing full information as to how a reader or
or oral, completed for assessment must use your viewer of your work can find the same information.
own language and expression. Where sources are A bibliography is compulsory in the extended essay.
used or referred to, whether in the form of direct
What constitutes malpractice?
quotation or paraphrase, such sources must be
Malpractice is behaviour that results in, or may
appropriately acknowledged.
result in, you or any student gaining an unfair
How do I acknowledge the work of others? advantage in one or more assessment component.
The way that you acknowledge that you have Malpractice includes plagiarism and collusion.
used the ideas of other people is through the use
Plagiarism is defined as the representation of the
of footnotes and bibliographies.
ideas or work of another person as your own. The
Footnotes (placed at the bottom of a page) or following are some of the ways to avoid plagiarism:
endnotes (placed at the end of a document) are
Words and ideas of another person used to
to be provided when you quote or paraphrase ●
support one’s arguments must be acknowledged.
from another document, or closely summarize the
Passages that are quoted verbatim must
information provided in another document. You ●
be enclosed within quotation marks and
do not need to provide a footnote for information
acknowledged.
that is part of a ‘body of knowledge’. That is,
CD-ROMs, email messages, web sites on the
definitions do not need to be footnoted as they are ●
Internet, and any other electronic media must
part of the assumed knowledge.
be treated in the same way as books and allowing your work to be copied or submitted
●
journals. for assessment by another student
The sources of all photographs, maps, duplicating work for different assessment
● ●
illustrations, computer programs, data, graphs, components and/or diploma requirements.
audio-visual, and similar material must be
Other forms of malpractice include any action that
acknowledged if they are not your own work.
gives you an unfair advantage or affects the results
Works of art, whether music, film, dance,
● of another student. Examples include, taking
theatre arts, or visual arts, and where the
unauthorized material into an examination room,
creative use of a part of a work takes place,
misconduct during an examination, and falsifying
must be acknowledged.
a CAS record.
Collusion is defined as supporting malpractice by
another student. This includes:
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About the authors
Hannah Tyson teaches English at the United Mark Beverley currently teaches English and
World College in Montezuma, NM. She has theory of knowledge at Sevenoaks School in the
participated in the revisions of the courses in UK, having recently returned from 11 years (8
English A and is the faculty member for the IB of those as Head of English Department) at the
Online Curriculum Center. Her special interest United World College of South East Asia. He is
in the current course is literature in translation. an examiner, Paper Setter and workshop leader
She is a senior examiner and moderator, as well for Language A: literature and, with Hannah Tyson,
as an online and live workshop leader. has recently led the online training in the new
course.
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Contents
Introduction 6 Unit 5 Conventions and genre
Chapter 9 Conventions and genre 143
Unit 1 Introduction to the course
Chapter 10 Drama 150
Chapter 1 Nine propositions about reading 7
Chapter 11 Poetry 175
Unit 2 Artful reading and writing
Chapter 12 The novel and short story 196
Chapter 2 The Golden Triangle: three vectors
Chapter 13 Prose other than fiction:
for writing with style 20
the autobiography 214
Chapter 3 Close reading as a practice 28
Chapter 14 Prose other than fiction:
Chapter 4 Tackling Paper 1 50 the travel narrative 225
Chapter 15 Prose other than fiction: the essay 240
Unit 3 Internal assessment
Chapter 16 How to write an essay for the
Chapter 5 The individual oral commentary 78
Paper 2 exam 252
Chapter 6 The individual oral presentation 107
Unit 6 Written assignment
Unit 4 A wider world
Chapter 17 The extended essay 273
Chapter 7 Literature in translation 127
Chapter 8 Writing: completing the assessment 134 Glossary 298
Index 301
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Introduction
The aim of this book is to provide support for students studying
the Language A: Literature program in English, either at standard
or higher level. It will take you through the various course
components, exploring the requirements of each one in turn,
provide an introduction to the different kinds of literary works you
will encounter, as well as highlight the types of skills ultimately
being assessed. There are many examples of student writing
alongside comments and advice from examiners, and it is packed
with activities that will develop good practice. The book does not seek
to prescribe formulae that guarantee success. What it does is draw
attention to the kinds of techniques and approaches that are the
hallmarks of successful students.
Literature presents us with different ways of seeing the world, and
in a connected sense the Language A: Literature course invites
response from you in a variety of ways. As you might well expect,
you will be called upon to speak, listen and write about literary
works, but perhaps more importantly, you will be asked to think
about them – what they are about, how they work and what
significance they have in the world. In this sense the course will
highlight many points of connection with theory of knowledge, and
this book makes use of those connections as it goes along. It also
offers guidance on the extended essay and places emphasis on the
importance of international-mindedness through examples of works
from other cultures and traditions.
Fundamentally, the Language A: Literature course asks you to
engage actively with the literature you will encounter, to embrace
a working methodology that highlights independence of thought
and creative, imaginative analysis of traditional and modern literary
works. It is perhaps with this spirit in mind that much of the book
has been written. Our hope is that as a course companion it will
help you ‘see’ literary works in a slightly clearer light. In this respect,
it is very much concerned with demands of the IB, but it also aims
to provide a broader preparation for successful reading, writing,
speaking and listening in university courses and beyond.
6
● ● ●1● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
Nne proposons abou readng
U
N
i
t

1

I
n
t
r
o
d
u
c
This introductory unit is meant to engage you in some t
i
collaborative ‘play’. This word is not just meant as a o
kind of cover for what is essentially ‘work’. The National n

Institute for Play proposes that play “shapes our brains,
t
o
creates our competencies, and ballasts our emotions”.

As we examine some proposals about reading in this t
h
chapter, and then about writing in Chapter 2, we would
e
like to look at these familiar parts of our schooling in a

new light: the play that “sculpts our brains… makes us c
smarter and more adaptable” (National Institute for o
Play, http://www.nifplay.org/vision.html). u
r
So we begin the collaboration by throwing out some s
e
ideas to you about reading, asking you to take them
on board, wrestle with them and follow some activities
that question them and see what they have to say.
Readng, n s many forms
While you have the luxury of being a student, it’s a good time to consider
what reading involves: how it can challenge you, change you, and make
you a person who is interesting to converse with… even find a partner
and certainly a circle of friends at different points in your life.
On the following pages are nine proposals about reading that might
make you think more widely or deeply about reading; you are invited
to examine them, argue with them, and refine them. They are not
‘truths’ but proposals.
Proposon 1: here are wo knds of readng
At the very least, here is one way to classify reading:
Everyday reading.
●
Artful reading.
●
In his DVD course The Art of Reading (The Teaching Company, 2009),
Professor Timothy Spurgin makes this useful distinction between types
of reading. He describes ‘everyday reading’ as the kind of reading we
do in our daily life to acquire information, follow instructions, get
directions, see what’s going on in the world: what we find in news
reports, recipes, emails, blogs and tweets.
7
1●Nine propositions about reading
Some of the reading we will do in this course will involve everyday
kind of reading – in fact, this book itself is that kind of reading. It will
provide answers to the following questions:
What’s this course about?
●
What is the course asking me to do?
●
How will I get my marks for the course?
●
What kind of work have other students done?
●
How have examiners responded to students’ work?
●
‘Artful reading’ is not quite the same thing. In fact, it can be very different
from everyday reading and that may possibly be the very reason for its
existence: to provide us with something that takes us beyond the
‘everyday’.
Professor Spurgin cites some of the differences; artful reading is:
reading to encounter things we have not yet or may not experience.
●
For example, what would it be like to be stranded on a desert island
with only a group of our peers, male, as in The Lord of the Flies or
female as in John Dollar?
reading to become aware of words themselves and their potential.
●
What difference from our everyday words do we see in the first part
of W. B. Yeats’ poem ‘The Second Coming’?
The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed,…
W. B. Yeats
To these purposes, we can add:
reading to compare to or understand our own experiences through
●
those of others; how similar or different is your experience to that
of Holden Caulfield of The Catcher in the Rye or to anyone in the Harry
Potter books?
reading to escape from our immediate surroundings, to enter other
●
worlds or to participate in imagining them as in Ender’s Game.
Maryanne Wolf in Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading
Brain offers some interesting ideas about humans reading. She talks
about reading as a remarkable invention, something that is neither a
necessity nor a natural evolution. “We were never born to read,” says
Wolf. She also argues that reading can cause a rewiring of the brain (Wolf
2007). On the other hand, Nicolas Carr and others are quite concerned
that our habit of skimming and our “hyperactive online habits” are doing
damage to our mental faculties (quoted by Patrick Kingsley, The Guardian,
15 July 2010). These issues are discussed further on pages 14–15.
8
UNIT 1●Introduction to the course
Proposon 2: here are some specal aspecs abou arful
readng and probably some specal sklls conneced o 
One of the features about artful or aesthetic writing and artful reading
that you are already familiar with, if not especially aware of, is that
there is more going on than the delivery of information.
So we could ask how do we artfully read things that are artfully written?
We are talking, of course, about poetry, novels, plays, short stories, as
well as travel narratives, essays, autobiographies and even letters.
Artful reading could be said to be reading that listens to words in several
ways:
first, to hear the content created by the words, such as the imaginary
●
lives and events of the novel, the tragic choices or comic sequence
of events of plays, the impressions of human feeling in poems.
second, to hear the molding of words and their music, to find
●
words used in new ways, in eye- and ear-catching ways; to be able
to hear “the brightness of the present tense” (Corrado Minardi)
or the music of the “still unravished bride of quietness / Thou
fosterchild of silence and slow time” (John Keats, ‘Ode on a
GrecianUrn’).
third, to listen for what Charles Baxter calls “the half-noticed and
●
the half-heard,” the meanings that are playing beneath the words.
Students often talk about this aspect of writing and reading as
“the deeper meaning”, but the more sophisticated term today is
“the subtext”. Baxter also calls this “the realm of what haunts the
imagination: the implied, the half-visible, the unspoken”
(Baxter2007).
To open yourself to all of these levels will equip you quite well to become
an ‘artful reader’. When you set yourself to read the words and hear
the words and speak the words, you begin to evolve towards the adult
reader that we hope you will become.
Proposon 3: here are reasons why here are so many
booksores, varees of e-book devces and readers who read
hese arful knds of wrng
If you were one of the many lucky children who were read to before
they could read on their own, you probably value the memory of reading
aloud and of being read to. Many people continue to extend that
experience by listening to audio books. It’s not by accident that people
like to write (sometimes artfully) about their memories of books and
being read to early in their lives and learning to read. Sven Birkert has
written a book with a title worth thinking about. It’s called The Gutenberg
Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. In it, Birkert writes:
From the time of earliest childhood, I was enthralled of the awakening inner life. Mostly there was pleasure,
by books. First, just by their material mysteries. but not always. I remember a true paralytic terror
Istudied the pages of print and illustration, stared brought on by the cartoon Dalmatians pictured on
myself into the wells of fantasy that are the hallmark the endpapers of my Golden Books. For a time
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1●Nine propositions about reading
Irefused to be alone in the room with the books,
even when the covers were safely closed… But that
was the exception… A page was a field studded
with tantalizing signs and a book was a vast play
structure riddled with openings and crevices I could
get inside…
Birkert, S. 1994.The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading
in an Electronic Age
Whatever may happen to the ‘fate of reading’, it seems that books,
reading and readers may be around for a while. What do you think?
y
t All of us are likely to have some memory of being read to or learning
i
v to read – or a reason why we don’t remember. After making a list
i with your class of some of the earliest books you encountered,
t
c write a short piece about one aspect or memory. Try to give it as
A
much individuality as Birkert does in his account.
Proposon 4: readng books can change your lfe
In spite of the fact that this statement seems like the worst of easy platitudes,
there are many people who claim that reading a particular book ‘changed
their life’, so many of them in fact that in 2007 Time Out Guides published
a book called 1000 Books to Change Your Life. Quite a lot of people were
willing to tell the publishers about reading that had had this dynamic
effect. A good many of these books would come under the category of
what we have called here ‘artful reading’ (or, in our case, IB reading).
Here is what Hari Kunzru, a novelist himself, has to say about his reading
of a long and complicated novel called Gravity’s Rainbow:
This is the one, the paperback that is held together with tape and probably won’t stand
another reading; this enormous novel about the chaos of the last days of World War
II, with its weird concerns about pigs and bananas and plastics manufacture, its occult
structure, its hokey songs, disconcerting scope and flagrant disregard for literary taste.
Gravity’s Rainbow is a book dumb enough to call a German spa town Bad Karma and
clever enough to induce in me, as a 19-year-old would-be writer, a sense of quasi-
religious awe that I find slightly embarrassing now, if only because it’s not really gone
away. After I first read it, Idecided most of my considerable problems would be solved
if only I could learn to make something as pleasurable and complex as this book. It
made me abandon most of the other options I was considering to make the time pass,
which in retrospect was a good thing.
Time Out Guides. 2007. 1000 Books to Change Your Life
Getting back to first experiences with books and reading, here is Jasper
Fforde’s recollection of encountering the two books about Alice by Lewis
Carroll. Here, he touches not only on life-changing through books, but
two other significant elements of personal reading: the first encounter
10 with reading and the later pleasures of re-reading.