Assignments

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Year 13 A2 LITERATURE
Assignments

To be completed during scheduled homework slots and handed in on the dates shown below.

You should also be maintaining your 'learning journal'.

AUTUMN TERM		Task	Hand-in week	Mark
7	Goldsmith	What are the characteristics of the baroque pastoral?	8
8	Goldsmith	"Society is all but rude, To this delicious solitude." from The Garden by Marvell How far do you agree that pastoral poetry presents living in society as an undesirable alternative to living close to nature?	9
9	Wordsworth	Using the opening section only of Lines, discuss how Wordsworth creates a distinctive 'tone of voice'.	10
10	Wordsworth	How is Wordsworth's poem typical of the pastoral genre and how is it typical of the Romantic movement?	11
11	Review Pastoral Poems	Using any appropriate means (diagrammatic, essay, PowerPoint), present a classification of the key elements of pastoral poetry and where these are exemplified in the poems you have studied.	12
12	Review Pastoral Poems	Do you agree that pastoral writing explores the benefits of living in the country as opposed to the town?	13
13	Blue Remembered Hills	How does the opening of the play establish links to the pastoral tradition.	14
14	Blue Remembered Hills	"What are those blue remembered hills? What spires, what farms are those? That is the land of lost content" To what extent do you agree that Blue Remembered Hills depicts "a land of lost content"?	15
15	Blue Remembered Hills	To what extent do you think writers in the pastoral tradition present their readers with perfect but mythical worlds? (Two 'texts'.)	Timed essay: Week 16
16	Blue Remembered Hills (DVD)	How does the original television play emphasise specific elements of the text, including the pastoral?	17
SPRING TERM		Task	Hand-in week	Mark
17	Elizabeth Jennings	In what ways do the three poems by Elizabeth Jennings fit into the pastoral tradition?	18
18	Philip Larkin	How far do you agree that many modern pastoral poems express a nostalgic desire to recapture past rural pleasures? What attitudes does Larkin share with those of Goldsmith in The Deserted Village ?	19
19	Philip Larkin	Blue Remembered Hills Dennis Potter Consider the view that in Blue Remembered Hills, the countryside is presented as a place of refuge from the evils of civilisation. Refer to both the text and the TV film which you have seen.	Timed essay: Week 20
20	U A Fanthorpe	“In your answer you must refer substantially to at least three texts.” To what extent can Larkin's poetry and the pastoral in general be taken as a lament for changing landscape and disappearing ways of life?	21
21	U A Fanthorpe	“In your answer you must refer substantially to at least three texts.” To what extent do Fanthorpe's poems and two other texts suggest that a pastoral treatment of the past will be inevitably prettified and nostalgic?	Timed essay: Week 22
22	Norman MacCaig	Blue Remembered Hills Dennis Potter Discuss whether Blue Remembered Hills is a pastoral drama or an anti-pastoral piece.	23
23	Norman MacCaig	“In your answer you must refer substantially to at least three texts.” “The concept of the rural ideal is a complex one, involving many different attitudes and values.” Discuss this view in relation to the presentation of nature in MacCaig's poetry and in two other texts.	Timed essay: Week 24
24	Dylan Thomas	“In your answer you must refer substantially to at least three texts.” Explore how pastoral conventions of subject matter and style have been incorporated and used in the texts you have studied.	25
25	Dylan Thomas	Blue Remembered Hills Dennis Potter Childhood has been depicted by some pastoral writers as a lost Golden Age and a time of closeness to Nature. Does Blue Remembered Hills show Potter to be one of those writers?	Timed essay: Week 26
26	Dylan Thomas	How does Dylan Thomas reinvent the pastoral genre?	27
27		“In your answer you must refer substantially to at least three texts." How do writers present the clash between town and country?	Timed essay: Week 28