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Pinpointing the debate in Literature essay questions

 

Pinpointing the debate in Literature essay questions

One of the main differences between GCSE and A Level English Literature is the format of the questions that they will have to answer. At GCSE, your students will be asked to explore a key theme or character(s). For example, here is a question about Romeo and Juliet from AQA's 2018 GCSE English Literature Paper 1:

  • Starting with this moment in the play, explore how Shakespeare presents relationships between adults and young people in Romeo and Juliet.

Nothing needs to be debated in that question, it asks us to simply 'explore' relationships between the young people and adults in the play. Granted, a student who wants a very high grade might include a conceptualised response to this question, which would involve debate, but it is not essential for your students to do this to get a decent grade.

Now, let's look at an A Level English Literature essay question from the same exam board:

  • ‘Moments of happiness in tragedies are rare and their only purpose is to heighten the tragic outcome.’ To what extent do you agree with this view in relation to two texts you have studied?
This is a lot different. The question provides students with an opinion about texts that fit into the genre of tragedy, and asks them to evaluate how much they agree with the opinion.

I think this is a significant jump between KS4 and KS5. In my experience, many students don't know where to begin with these statement-based questions - and why should they? We have spent two years drilling a totally different exam paper into their heads.

So, when completing the first few essays in year 12, I spend some time with my students helping them to unpick the statement, so that they can engage in meaningful debate in their essays.

First of all, let's return to the statement listed above ('Moments of happiness...'). The first thing that I would ask my students to do is to quickly identify what the moments of happiness are in the tragic texts that we have studied, and to give some thought as to whether they are rare or not. When I teach A Level English Literature, I focus on the selection of Keats poetry, so here are some ideas:

  • In 'La Belle Dame sans Merci', there aren't many moments of happiness - perhaps three or four stanzas where sexual activity/romance is implied between the 'fairy's child' and the 'knight-at-arms'.
  • There isn't much to be happy about in 'Isabella' - Isabella and Lorenzo's love affair is soon cut short by her avaricious brothers.
  • It's suggested that Lamia and Lycius have a lovely time together, away from prying eyes in their Corinthian love-shack, but there isn't much else in the way of happy moments.
  • 'Eve of St. Agnes' is utterly miserable from start to finish. The 'happy' moments are only happy if you're a voyeuristic pervert who likes to hide in closets (read the poem for yourself - it's very dodgy).
What a happy chap John Keats was... dear me!

Now, we cannot simply explore these moments, we have to engage in debate. Once we have identified the relevant parts from the poems, we have to consider the second part of the statement:

  • '...and their only purpose is to heighten the tragic outcome.'
For me, the word 'only' is really important in this statement. The title of this blog is 'pinpointing the debate', and I think that to be able to do this your students need to give careful consideration to how the statement has been worded (God knows the exam board will have given long, careful consideration when writing it!). We have established that moments of happiness in these Keats poems do tend to be rare, but is their inclusion only so that the tragic ending seem worse or more heart-breaking? Let's go back to the poems:

  • 'La Belle Dame sans Merci' begins pretty badly - the knight-at-arms looks like he's at death's door at the beginning, and this is exactly the same at the end. The happy moments hardly make that any more shocking/sad/heart-breaking - it just explains how he ended up there.
  • Now, 'Isabella' is a tricky one. On the surface, it does support the view put forward in the statement, because they are so head-over-heels in love with each other at the beginning, and the ending is so depressingly sad and horrifying when (checks notes) she's had to put her boyfriend's decapitated head in a plant pot with some basil in it, and then her brothers nick it. However, there is a lot of foreshadowing earlier in the poem that suggests all this misery was inevitable. Perhaps this lessens the impact of the ending, rather than heightening it?
  • 'Lamia' is similar to 'Isabella' - there are lots of hints that things will end badly, which prepares us for when Apollonius drops a tragic truth-bomb on Lycius.
  • The moments of happiness in 'Eve of St. Agnes' aren't even real - they're in Madeleine's dreams. The outcome of this poem doesn't even feel that tragic anyway, as the ending is quite ambiguous.
So, having run through that, I think that I could write an essay arguing that this selection of Keats's poetry does not necessarily fit in with the statement that was originally put forward. 

This might lead me to question what the 'purpose' of these moments of happiness are. In the case of a text like 'La Belle Dame sans Merci', you could argue that the moments of happiness are there to remind us that the knight-at-arms is not doing his duty, and is gallivanting with the dodgy fairy woman. If anything, these moments of happiness just make me mad and eventually pleased that he gets his comeuppance. Stop stuffing your face with manna-dew and get back to work, you slacker!

Here is another one of the exam questions:
  • ‘The suffering experienced by tragic protagonists always evokes pity in readers and audiences.’
Again, we can pinpoint the debate by looking at the word 'always'. Planning an answer to this question is straightforward; we just ask:

  1. What suffering is depicted?
  2. Does it evoke pity?
  3. Does this happen in each Keats poem that I've studied?
If the answer to that third question is mostly no, then you know what to write about in your conclusion. For me, a conclusion in this sort of essay question should just answer which argument wins?

That's all for now - I'm off to water my pot of basil.


The views in this blog are not necessarily shared or endorsed by the centre that I currently work at or the examining body in question.


Photo at the top of the page by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash
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