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Wednesday 1 March 2023

'A' Level English 1977

New Month Old Post: first posted 19th May 2016

Park Lane College tried to put me off. They maintained the one-year course was only for re-sit students and that the two-year course was more suitable, especially as I had not studied English Literature at any level. Somehow I talked my way in. 

It was one of the most difficult courses I have ever done. Selecting and organising all the quotations, literary criticism and conflicting viewpoints into examination-usable form was gruelling, but it was interesting and enjoyable as well, and developed useful skills for later. It was certainly an intense experience because I can still picture the classroom and where we all sat: me at the back.

Most on the course were indeed re-sit students, mainly girls in their late teens, and as late as 1977, in Leeds, there was only one non-white student. The token teenage lad worked at the tax office and told gleeful tales about the persecution of wayward taxpayers. But there were other older first timers. There was an aloof social worker who gazed contemptuously out under her Joanna Lumley ‘Purdey’ fringe and exchanged hardly more than a dozen words with the rest of us all year. There was a bearded chap in his early thirties who said little more, yet managed to give the impression he knew everything already. And luckily, there was a kindred spirit also aiming for university. His grasp of the coursework, huge vocabulary and sweeping command of the English language put mine to shame. It was enormously helpful to be able to discuss things with someone of similar aims and interests.

The syllabus in those days offered enormous, some would say excessive choice. You could get away with covering just two out of three Shakespeare plays, one out of three longer poetic works and four out of sixteen set books. So that’s all we did. It would have been silly to try to cover everything. The course leader, Jonathan Brown, pared things down to what could be achieved in a year. Even within these bounds the exam paper offered a choice of questions.

Do they still let you take the question papers home? They did then, so here they are (click to enlarge images, or get them in PDF form here).

ENGLISH LITERATURE PAPER I (3 hours)

Section A: ShakespeareJulius Caesar, Othello and The Winter’s Tale.  

The rubric was complicated but essentially you had to answer three questions covering at least two of the three plays. In other words you could get away with studying only two. We did Julius Caesar and Othello.

English Literature A Level Paper 1977

First, you had to answer either Question 1 or Question 2, above, which quoted passages from the plays and asked you to address specific issues relating to them. It looks like I did the Julius Caesar part of Question 2.

English Literature A Level Paper 1977
Then, questions 3, 4 and 5 were discussion questions on the three Shakespeare plays. You had to do two, but each offered an either/or choice. I did 3(a) on Julius Caesar and 4(b) on Othello.

From the notes made after the exam on the first page, it seems I estimated I had got no more than a C in this paper.
English Literature A Level Paper 1977Section B: Longer Poetic Works.

There were three set texts: Pope’s Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, Wordsworth’s The Prelude and T. S. Elliot’s East Coker and Little Gidding, with one question on each. As you had to answer just one of the three questions, we only studied Pope’s Epistle.

Again, there was an either/or choice within each of question. It looks like I did 6(a).

ENGLISH LITERATURE PAPER II (3 hours)

Novels, Plays and Poetry: four from sixteen set texts.

English Literature A Level Paper 1977

The syllabus offered sixteen different works, but the examination only required you to answer questions on four, so we covered only four: Jane Austen’s Persuasion, the selected poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the poems of Wilfred Owen, and Arthur Miller’s plays A View from the Bridge and All My Sons. Again, the paper had an either/or choice within each question. I think I answered questions 7(b), 10(a), 12(a) and 14(b).

The other twelve items on the Paper 2 syllabus were parts of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus, Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi, Metaphysical Poetry, Defoe’s Moll Flanders, Sheridan’s The Rivals and The School for Scandal, Keats Lamia and other poems, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Poetry of the Thirties, Patrick White’s The Tree of Man, and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.

ENGLISH LITERATURE PAPER III (2 hours)

Literary Criticism. Two compulsory questions quoting passages from unnamed works followed by lists of points to be addressed.

English Literature A Level Paper 1977

Paper III was the joker in the pack, impossible to prepare for fully in advance. I really thought I had messed this up.

Question 1: two poems. With the help of the internet I can now identify them as John Stallworthy’s A Poem about Poems About Vietnam, and Seamus Heaney’s The Folk Singers.

Question 2: a passage I recognised in the exam as being from George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. I remember timidly deciding not to say I knew what it was. I don’t know whether you got extra marks if you did. 


Looking back over forty years, Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poetry left the strongest impression. I can still quote Pied Beauty by heart. A lot of people find his poetry dense and unintelligible, so it was a real privilege to be able to take time to dissect and understand his ‘conglomerate epithets’ and obsession with the different roots of the English language. His lines still come back both in moments of elation and despair.
 
Wilfred Owen too, remains familiar from his regular outings in television programmes and newspaper articles about the First World War. Years later, attending a conference at the Craiglockart campus of Edinburgh Napier University, I could not help but be aware that this was where Owen and Siegfried Sassoon had been treated for shell shock almost a century earlier. Sitting on the lawn in front of the main building, eating lunch in the sun, I imagined they might once have done exactly the same, discussing poetry during Owen’s brief respite from his doomed youth. Sadly, the topic of our own lunchtime conversation was computing.

Arthur Miller revealed a great deal about how plays are put together. I later felt there were more than just situational similarities between the film Saturday Night Fever and A View from the Bridge, although to be strictly accurate they were different bridges.

I was astonished by Alexander Pope’s verbal dexterity and can still remember chunks of the Epistle.

On the other hand, despite my enthusiasm at the time, I am ashamed to say I read no more Shakespeare. I know he was myriad-minded, but it takes effort, and I became too tied up with other things to try.

The same is true of Persuasion, despite the once-or-twice stand-in teacher at Leeds Park Lane College, Mr. Trowbridge, declaring that whenever he felt disheartened there was no better remedy than to go to bed with Jane Austen. He even got a laugh from us with that one.

28 comments:

  1. No English Lit course today would consist totally of white men and two token white women writers. Progress!

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    1. We said the very same thing in discussing it at wome the other day. The paper was 46 years ago. But, to be controversial, was that a bad thing?

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    2. Debra injures womanhood and sets back feminism by asserting that Jane Austen & George Eliot were on the syllabus because of mere tokenism. Genius transcends gender.

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    3. As I see it, it was *English* Literature, i.e. written in English because it has an American, but there are no translated works. It also covers the centuries. Women and others were as good as barred from showing their genius until very recent times. Those who did had unusually supportive circumstances.

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    4. My favourite post-war English fiction writer is Elizabeth Taylor, though her books show no sign of the Promethean quest of Lawrence or William Golding or Patrick White.

      I do not think women search for the Promethean fire.
      They are brilliant psychologists from Austen to Rebecca West, George Eliot to Alice Munro and Penelope Fitzgerald.

      Male novelists if they are any good are a wee bit mad.
      Burgess said : *Virginia Woolf wrote as a very sane woman and went mad. James Joyce wrote like a madman and remained sane.*

      Virginia Woolf's *A Room of One's Own* outlined the hurdles a woman had to surmount to succeed in the world of letters.
      Think of all the women who could have been writers if domestic circumstances had not prevented it.
      Tillie Olsen (1912-2007 Wiki) has a haunting anthology of marginal women, *Voices* .

      It is the term 'dead white males' I object to because it is now a part of our idiotic vocabulary in the age of Woke.
      Genius transcends gender : Susan Sontag accepted that she lacked genius though she was stuffed with talent.

      Carmen Paglia said :
      *I think that genius and criminality are both extremes and deviations off the end of the human spectrum, and this is my opinion for why there are no great women composers and artists.*

      See the blog *Song of the Lark - In Which I Learn There Are No Great Women Composers.* 2015.
      I found the Paglia quotation in one of the comments.

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    5. Women work tirelessly as devoted mothers & unpaid carers, as trauma nurses, paramedics & surgeons in war-zones and countries wrecked by famine and earthquakes.
      Women labour tirelessly as war correspondents, armed cops and conflict resolution workers.
      They also clean and scrub our financial offices and feed the hungry in canteens and soup kitchens for the homeless.

      So I am not confusing courage and stamina with the male quest for the Promethean fire, indeed it may be the weakness and inadequacy of men that lead them to challenge the gods, if only in their imaginative endeavours.

      Along with Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch may have been the most ambitious of post-war writers in the English language.
      She seems to have submitted herself to dominant male intellectuals like Elias Canetti author of *Crowds and Power* who settled in London after the war and manipulated weaker people under his influence.
      A Canetti-like figure appears in Murdoch novels such as *The Black Prince* and *A Fairly Honourable Defeat*.

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  2. All quite familiar to me Tasker/

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    1. As Debra Who Seeks implies, these used to be the standard stuff, good or bad.

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  3. I got much pleasure from this post though I would not wish to be in anyone's essay class again.
    You will send me back to Alexander Pope tomorrow - what a terrible life he had corseted into that armature that held up his ailing body.
    Lost in Austen is a funny television series (YouTube) about a London lady who discovers the Bennet household through a portal on the other side of her bathroom wall.
    A few days before Christmas I bought the Penguin Hamlet because I felt like a ghost story with a castle and Harold Bloom is my favourite critic on Shakespeare.
    The cover has a 1958 portrait of Sir Michael Redgrave as the Prince painted by Brian Kneale.
    John Wain who wrote a book on Shakespeare said only a thin partition wall separates our language from the Bard's.

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    1. Enjoy Alexander Pope. True Wit is Nature to advantage dress'd, What oft was thought, but ne'er so well express'd;

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  4. When I sat for my master's exam, there were three questions consisting of two questions; pick one to discuss. To my utter amazement and delight, the three questions I selected I was totally prepared for, the other three not at all. Considering all the work we had covered in two years, it was a total gift that I had prepared so well on those three questions.

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    1. A great feeling. Mine was more my design than accident.

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  5. We can't believe you still have the exam papers!

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  6. I was forced to Shakespeare in my teens. I just did not get it all and I still don't. There are some things in life I am not meant to understand.

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    1. I find it hard work and am amazed how some seem to be able to understand it without effort.

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  7. Go to bed with Jane Austen made me laugh Tasker.😊

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  8. Whatever you can say about exams, good or bad, it introduces us to a wide range of authors and thinking. Also, we don't have to do them anymore!

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    1. I think the purpose is to take us outside our comfort zone.

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  9. You still have your A level exam papers! Just incredible.

    I did English A level a few years before you. My two Shakespeare plays were King Lear and HIV part 2. I am very glad I studied Shakespeare as I have seen many plays since then (Jean luc Picard as Macbeth was pretty amazing). I don’t think it is necessary to study it though. At his first Hamlet, during the interval, I jokingly asked my partner if he wanted to stay or leave. His response was he wanted to stay because “he wanted to see what happens” - fabulous. He also put “seems, madam, nay it is. I know not seems” into his lexicon. He had no idea that was a phrase one would learnt if studying the play. He just knew it was good.

    Fabulous post. Many thanks for this.

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    1. See 3 posts above - with Andrew. Some get it with ease, others find it hard. Pleased you enjoyed the post.

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  10. I'm a low educated nobody who just doesn't see the point of English Literature. I learned basic English which covered spelling and grammar and that's good enough for me. I would have gone nuts having to learn all that instead of getting a job and earning a living.

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    1. I enjoyed it, but I still struggle with Shakespeare.

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  11. I sat similar English papers in the summer of 1972. Of course I always saw the point of English Literature and still do. The purpose of education is not merely to feed the fickle job market but to enlighten and civilise too. To be honest, I think I have gained far more from peeling back the layers of Shakespeare's language than from seeing his plays in performance but perhaps that's just me.

    I wonder if there should be a new A level called "The History and Composition of Past A Level Papers"? You would surely earn an A grade!

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    1. Eng Lit covered many moral issues too. Your new exam would be very wide. You would have to know about maths, Latin, art and so many other things. Your pub quiz team could bo it.

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  12. Wow - that was a dense lesson plan, Tasker!
    I share your admiration for Gerard Manley Hopkins - and agree with Mr. Trowbridge: Jane Austen is a lovely read (more than once - and after that a DVD).

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    1. I am impressed that you admire BMH. Many native English speakers cannot make sense of his complex language. Pied Beauty is wonderful.

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I welcome comments and hope to respond within a day or two, but vision issues are making this increasingly difficult. Please note: comments on posts over a month old will not appear until they have been moderated.