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Aims
•Understand aspects of the A2 course
•Analyse a poem•Consider critical interpretations of a poem
Further and Independent Reading You must study a range of texts, one of the these
will be in the anthology of critical writing applied to a piece of literature. The pack of critical material is designed for specific use with coursework Unit 4, but will have wider application across the whole of A2 study of English Literature.
It will therefore contribute significantly to your to progression from AS. It is designed to help you to make connections across texts, and to see that the study of Literature is underpinned by certain methods and ideas.
The purpose of the critical material is to introduce you to some different ways in which the study of Literature can be approached.
National Trust
What does this mean to you?
National Trust
You have the security in ‘trust’. Also the trust that what is significant to the nation will be preserved.
Images of beautiful natural landscape. It is a middle-class institution.
Annotate the poem
Consider the tone of the poem, the devices Harrison uses to create this tone.
What’s the meaning of the poem do you think?
Bottomless pits. There's one in Castleton, and stout upholders of our law and orderone day thought its depth worth wagering onand borrowed a convict hush-hush from his warderand winched him down; and back, flayed, grey, mad, dumb.
Not even a good flogging made him holler!
O gentlemen, a better way to plumbthe depths of Britain's dangling a scholar, say, here at the booming shaft at Towanroath, now National Trust, a place where they got tin, those gentlemen who silenced the men's oathand killed the language that they swore it in.
The dumb go down in history and disappearand not one gentleman's been brough to book:
Mes den hep tavas a-gollas y dyr
(Cornish-) 'the tongueless man gets his land took.'
Marxism: a theory in which class struggle is a central element in the analysis of social change in Western societies.”
Marxism is the antithesis of capitalism, which is defined by Encarta as “an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and distribution of goods, characterized by a free competitive market and motivation by profit.”
Marxist Literary Theory
•Focuses on the representation of class distinctions and class conflict in literature
•Focuses more on social and political elements than artistic and visual (aesthetic) elements of a text
Marxist Criticism
• The author’s social class• Its effects upon the author’s society• Examining the history and the culture of
the times as reflected in the text• Investigate how the author either
correctly or incorrectly pictures this historical period
Questions
Is there an objection to socialism or capitalism?
Does the text raise criticism about the emptiness of life in bourgeois society?
What does the author portray about society?
What is emphasized, what is ignored?Are characters from all social levels equally
sketched?Are the main problems individual or
collective?
Read Section A1
The politics of class: Marxism
• How does the author’s social and economic class show through the work?
• Does the work support the economic and social status quo, or does it advocate change?
• What role does the class system play in the work? • What role does class play in the work?• What is the author’s analysis of class relations?• Do characters overcome oppression? What’s the impact of this?• What does the work say about oppression; or are social conflicts
ignored or blamed elsewhere? • Does the work propose some form of utopian vision as a solution
to the problems encountered in the work?• In what ways does the work serve as propaganda?• Does the literature reflect the author’s own class or analysis of
class relations?
Questions Raised By the Marxist Literary Lens
One thing that has a profound affect on our language is education. It floods the idiolect with new words but also new attitudes towards language. It often challenges the linguistic forms into which we have been socialised at home, particularly if those forms are regional, even if they are not fully fledged dialect forms. We learn for example that being educated conventionally implies certain kinds of language and language use and that bad language will only lead to badness of other kinds. The further we go on in education the more likely it is that these pressures to recognise the value of a Standard English will be felt. This is a major part of the argument that suggests that middle-class children do better than others in education. They do so because the language of education is their language. Children who bring regional dialects to the classroom have a lot more to learn before they can effectively begin to learn.Source: http://cw.routledge.com/textbooks/9780415455121/downloads/sample.pdf
Research the context that this was written in
Context
Create a timeline of events that happened just before this was written.
What was Britain like in the 1970s?
You can create links between NT andThem and Uz Note the use voice and language for
empowerment and subjugation. Harrison’s anthology is called The School
Of Eloquence. What does this suggest about both
language and education
Remember Basil Bernstein’s research we discussed?
Basil Bernstein - Class, Codes and Control (1971)Forms of spoken language in the process of their
learning initiate, generalize and reinforce special types of relationship with the environment and thus create for the individual particular forms of significance” That is to say that the way language is used within a particular societal class affects the way people assign significance and meaning to the things about which they are speaking. Littlejohn (2002) agrees and states, “people learn their place in the world by virtue of the language codes they employ” The code that a person uses indeed symbolizes their social identity (Bernstein, 1971).
αίαι, ay, ay! … stutterer Demosthenes gob full of pebbles outshouting seas – 4 words only of mi ‘art aches and … ‘Mine’s broken, you barbarian, T.W.!’ He was nicely spoken. ‘Can’t have our glorious heritage done to death!’ I played the Drunken Porter in Macbeth. ‘Poetry’s the speech of kings. You’re one of those Shakespeare gives the comic bits to: prose! All poetry (even Cockney Keats?) you see ‘s been dubbed [Λs] into RP, Received Pronunciation, please believe [Λs] Your speech is in the hands of the Receivers.’ ‘We say [Λs] not [uz], T.W.!’ That shut my trap. I doffed my flat a’s (as in ‘flat cap’) my mouth all stuffed with glottals, great lumps to hawk up and spit out… E-nun-ci-ate!
So right, ye buggers, then! We’ll occupy your lousy leasehold Poetry. I chewed up Littererchewer and spat the bones into the lap of dozing Daniel Jones, dropped the initials I’d been harried as and used my name and own voice: [uz] [uz] [uz], ended sentences with by, with, from, and spoke the language that I spoke at home. RIP, RP, RIP T.W. I’m Tony Harrison no longer you! You can tell the Receivers where to go (and not aspirate it) once you know Wordsworth’s matter/water are full rhyme, [uz] can be loving as well as funny. My first mention in the Times automatically made Tony Anthony!
