Year: 2022

Magical Thinking

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The purpose of Language A: Literature Paper 1 is for you to write a Guided Literary Analysis to a passage taken from any one of four major literary genres: prose fiction, poetry, drama, prose non-fiction. You have one hour and fifteen minutes to create your response (or two hours and 15 minute for HL students to complete two responses). Therefore, it’s not meant to be a comprehensive, line-by-line analysis; you simply don’t have time to write about every single idea and feature in the given text. ‘Guided’ means that you are provided with a question that gives you a focus for your writing and I highly recommend that you use this question to help you plan a response of reasonable length that you can produce in the time available to you. That’s not to say that you should limit yourself or write dogmatically. The response below demonstrates how, if you begin with a focus on the terms of the question, later in your answer you can include other relevant observations.

Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder

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Ruth Pitter’s poetry can sometimes be interpreted in light of her religious faith; after the Second World War Pitter experienced a religious awakening. That’s definitely a theme in this poem, which tells of an encounter with a seemingly insignificant animal – a tiny bat. As an unseen textual analysis, it’s not expected that you’ll have any knowledge at all of the poem or poet, but that won’t stop you from sensing the religious undertone to this poem, particularly in the demonic diction and imagery of the opening verse or two. Read through the poem and the sample response underneath to see how you might integrate this understanding into a complete answer. And, if you don’t think you would have noticed the religious allegory, don’t worry – there’s more than one way to skin a cat (or a bat)!

Non-Fiction Study: Fun Home by Alison Bechdel

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Fun Home is a graphic novel recounting the story of Alison Bechdel coming out as a lesbian. Told in non-chronological flashbacks to her childhood in Beech Creek, the story works through her difficult childhood relationship with her father, Bruce, and her gradual discovery that he, too, harboured secrets from Bechdel, her mother and siblings.

Non-Fiction Prose Study: Nothing to Envy by Barbara Demick

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The timeline of Nothing to Envy charts the lead-up to the devastating North Korean famine (euphemistically called The Arduous March in the DPRK), a period of mass starvation that lasted from 1994 – 1999 in which between 2 and 3.5 million North Koreans lost their lives. As money and jobs dried up in the years before the famine, people started to fear the worst. Even the government regime, so reluctant to accept anything might be wrong in their workers’ paradise, instigated a propaganda campaign exhorting people to eat less food. Not that the people had much choice. By the mid-1990s, the countryside was stripped bare and mothers resorted to making soups out of grass, and porridge out of tree bark, rice husk and sawdust.

Literary Compare and Contrast (Paper 2)

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Whichever Language A course you have elected to study, in this section you’ll learn how to prepare in advance for your Paper 2, techniques for approaching different questions, how to plan on the day, and how to structure and write a brilliant compare and contrast essay. You’ll find sample essays that have been written using the texts from your course which you can read and discuss, and you’ll be encouraged to prepare in the best way possible: write your own model responses to sample open questions.

Culture Mashing

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Intertextuality is everywhere in today’s culture, and one of its most striking forms is the cultural mash-up. Sampling, remixes, and collages dominate the digital world. From mash-ups and fan edits to street art and fan fiction, creators now reimagine beloved stories and cultural icons with ease. While some of this work is playful or amateurish, much of it is inventive and meticulously crafted, raising questions about creativity, ownership, and the blurred lines between high and low culture.

Poetry Study: The Farmer’s Bride by Charlotte Mew

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On a modest London street in Bloomsbury in 1913 called Devonshire Street stood a tiny independent bookshop by the name of The Poetry Bookshop. It’s proprietor was Harold Munro, and he ran this friendly neighbourhood store until 1926. As well as selling books of poetry, Harold also published – and it’s thanks to him that Charlotte Mew, a sometimes shy-and-silent young woman from Bloomsbury, found her audience. Invited to the shop by Harold’s assistant Alida Klemantaski, while Mew had never sought fame, she agreed to the publication of The Farmer’s Bride in 1916.

Prose Study: Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress by Dai Sijie

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The story of Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress opens as the narrator (who remains unnamed) and his best friend Luo arrive at the Phoenix of the Sky village in the Chinese province of Sichuan near the border with Tibet. The year is 1971 and Mao Zedong, Chairman of the People’s Republic of China, is conducting a policy of ‘re-education’ whereby young men of middle-class families are sent to the countryside to learn from poor peasants how to be model citizens. The two boys are tasked with menial and back-breaking work, such as coal mining and carrying buckets of faeces up the mountain to fertilize the rice fields.

Children Playing

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According to the IB Subject Guide for Language and Literature, of the two texts presented to you in your Paper 1 examination, one will be predominately verbal (meaning it will have comparatively more text) and one will be visual in nature (meaning the image or images will dominate). If you are an SL student you will have a choice and, while you shouldn’t go into the exam determined to consider only one type of text, you can follow your own strengths in regard to your choice of which text to analyse. HL students will have to analyse both, which reflects the greater amount of class time you are given to explore and learn various text types. In this sample, the text is one single image, which is a common way for satirical cartoonists to present their work. Take some time to work on this text yourself, then read the sample answer below for an idea of how you might analyse this kind of text.

You Have a Question, Calvin?

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Comic strips are a popular text type to read and study and may also appear on Paper 1. By this stage in your education, your use of language is quite developed, and it may be hard for teachers to help you too much with your use of language (according to criteria D, 5 of your marks for this paper are available for the way you use language). However, one way to boost your mark in criteria D is to use the correct terminology in relation to the text type. In this response you can find the words ‘panel’, ’emanata’, ‘speech bubble’, ‘negative space’ and ‘punchline’. Of course, identifying these features correctly is only the start; commenting on the effect of features you see will help you score in criteria B as well.