COURSEWORK HAND-IN: MONDAY 31st MARCH

Final deadline for both A2 Lit (3000 word essay) and A2 Comms (podcast) is on Monday. You need to hand in your work between 12.30 and 3.00pm in 1D25.

A2 Comms students: you need to have exported your finished podcast as a WAV, and we will transfer this from your USB to our USB. The computers will be available during the hand-in time for any final finishing - the hand in period includes our normal lesson time. Once your courseowrk is sorted & you have handed in, you will not need to stay for the remainder of the lesson.

A2 Lit students: please remember to put your name on every page; include footnotes; include two final word counts - one including quotes, one excluding quotes & include a bibliography at the end of the essay. Remember that your word count excluding quotes must not go over 3000 words. Lear lesson as normal at 10.15!

Good luck.

AS Comms & Culture - example text for Question 3

A2 Lit - excellent website with some good stuff on Lear

This website is aimed at A-level Literature students and Undergraduate Lit students. Check out the Lear stuff - including a seminar next week: click here.

AS Lang Lit - lessons, revision time & mocks

Today (24th March): lesson as normal
Thursday 27th March: no lesson - you have this time to revise
Monday 31st March: no lesson due to Thursday's lesson being extended for the mock
Thursday 3rd April: MOCK EXAM 12.00pm - 1.40pm 1E6 Please note the early start of this lesson/change of room in order to allow us to fit the whole mock in. Please be on time for the mock and come exam ready (e.g. with pens)

AS LangLit: All My Sons - How to revise

Revision suggestions

 

Remember that you have 40 minutes for the All My Sons question: 10 minutes to read the extract & annotate; 30 minutes to write

 

Watch the movie version of All My Sons here: click here to watch

 

Listen to All My Sons (we listened to some of this in class):

Listen to Part 1; Listen to Part 2 

 

Watch the BBC shorts clips about All My Sons (we have watched a few of these in class): click here to watch

 

Imagine that you are the examiner and have been told to set a paper on the character of Annie. Choose what you consider to be the best extract in the text, which would allow students to analyse how her character is presented through the representation of speech and other dramatic devices. Make a list of the key points you would expect to see students making about the extract.

 

Repeat the above exercise for questions on Chris, Keller and Jim.

 

Open your play at random and read those two pages. Imagine that was the extract set in the exam: what would the question be? What would you write?

 

Re-read the play (remember I said you needed to have read it at least 4 times before the exam).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



AS Comms Twilight: Subcultures

Interesting & relevant article on subculture here from The Guardian: click here.
Useful reading to help prepare for question 1 of the exam...

AS COMMS - sample exam paper and answer

AS Comms - sample exam answer

SAMPLE EXAM ANSWER

Question 1 (20 marks)

‘Popular culture is a form of cultural pollution, which undermines traditional values and standards.’

 

This viewpoint, which I will be supporting in this essay, stems from ideas relating to culture which can be traced back to Matthew Arnold. The idea that popular culture ‘pollutes’ culture suggests that traditional (high) culture needs to be protected from the superficial and disposable world of contemporary popular culture.

By separating culture from money, Arnoldsaw culture as an expression of creativity rather than as a mechanical production line shooting out cultural products for audiences to gobble up and then throw away when they become bored. I see culture as something which expresses a truth or an idea about humanity in a way which is not afraid to be challenging; the contemporary world of Big Brother and Heat magazine are two good examples of popular cultural products which threaten real (or ‘high’ culture).

The Channel 4 television show Big Brother presents a world where celebrity-status (however z-list) is the prize and where the journey is made up of trivial and mundane popularity contests. It offers absolutely nothing of value whilst attempting to create an ‘addiction’ of voyeurism and its cheap thrills. Meanwhile, while Channel 4 count the money as the advertising revenue rolls in, they also cut their funding of serious documentaries and weighty dramas and films because ‘good’ television cannot attract big enough audiences. This‘dumbing down’ of culture by programmes like Big Brother encourages audiences to lose their powers of concentration and their ability to think and be challenged. Presumably this is why Channel 4 is happy to screen Big Brother and its spin-offs on several channels, often at prime time, yet was not interested in purchasing the rights to the challenging, thought-provoking and critically acclaimed drama series The Wire (a drama of real cultural value).

Magazines like Heat feed off programmes like Big Brother in circulating interviews and photos of ex-contestants shopping in Tescos, promoting a culture of empty celebrity and encouraging people to sift through mindless pap rather than read a book or reflect on what might be important in life. Popular culture encourages to us to develop an interest in gossip rather than the news, in celebrity rather than humanity, and moulds us to expect culture to be easy to absorb.

A further example can be found in London’s theatre-land. Musicals fill theatres up and down Shaftesbury Avenue because they are popular and accessible. Meanwhile, directors have little chance of staging plays by both traditional and contemporary playwrights because audiences are used to a good tune to sing along to rather than 90 minutes of concentration and being challenged to think.

The victim here is real culture – anything genuinely challenging and interesting is being rejected in favour of easy, lazy consumption. Popular culture really is polluting our cultural world.

Question 2

Personal communication is much influenced by the gender of both senders and receivers. Consider gender’s specific influence on appearance. (20 marks)

It can be argued that the means by which we communicate with others is significantly influenced by our gender – our understanding of what it means to be male or female. This understanding has been learnt via agents of socialisation such as our family, the media and our peer group. According to Goffman, the ways we communicate – which includes our appearance – are aligned to how we choose to stage ourselves to the outside world. Our use of props -which may well include clothes, accessories and body art - communicate our self-image to others as well as the sub-cultural groups that we belong to. Perhaps above all, our appearance communicates our own understanding of ourselves (as we have learned it) as either male or female.

Traditionally, gender has been communicated through appearance in fairly structured ways. A good way of examining this is to consider the traditional school uniform: trousers, shirt and tie for boys, a skirt or dress for girls. These paradigmatic choices of clothing in themselves communicate an ideology relating to the differing roles of men and women in society as well as ideas about masculinity and femininity. Clothes were seen as a signifier of power (men) or domesticity (women). The changing perception of women as people who can take an equal role in the work-place means that in contemporary society it is now perfectly acceptable for women to wear trousers; however it is still pretty unusual to see a man dressed in a skirt or a dress in the work-place (or elsewhere in society, for that matter). Perhaps this suggests that the cultural codes governing male identity are more controlled than they are for women. If a man wears a skirt he is choosing to make a statement: one message being encoded by this choice of clothing could be that he is rejecting the stereotypical assumptions of masculinity. When David Beckham was photographed wearing a sarong a few years ago, he was both mocked and acclaimed by different sections of the media. Some receivers saw it as a healthy expression of a modern male identity, and a rejection of the burden of the stereotypical male image – others read his clothing choice more as a cynical attempt to appeal to the pink pound, or even as a comment on his own sexual orientation.

Makeup is another prop used differently depending on gender. For women, the cultural practice of wearing makeup has become normalised; it is almost expected that to present yourself as a ‘normal’ woman you must enhance your facial features in the form of this literal ‘mask’ (Goffman). Who this mask is for is debateable. Some women will claim that it is not to present themselves as more attractive to men but to enhance their own self-confidence. Of course, make-up also comes with its own cultural codes – too much and you are perceived as a slapper. The syntagm of what is means to be a man in western society does not include the wearing of make-up because make-up is a signifier of femininity. When men do choose to wear make-up it is probably a way of expressing their membership of a sub-cultural group (such as punks or Goths) where the boundaries of gender identity are allowed to be more blurred, or perhaps their sexual orientation.

Question 3 – cover of Finishing Touches book.

a) Who do you think is the audience for this text? (4 marks)

Judging by the paradigmatic choices made in constructing this book cover, we can infer that the audience being targeted is female, 25-45 and middle class with aspirational tastes.

b) Identify and briefly explain icons, indexes and symbols within this text. (6 marks)

Iconic signifers include the woman, the sofa & the fireplace – collectively they are used to signify a home – specifically, the lounge. The assumption is that it is a lounge the audience aspire to.

Indexical signifers include the positioning of the woman. The way she holds the cushion acts as evidence that this is herlounge. The outstretched hand in the direction of vase acts as evidence that she has just finished putting the ‘finishing touches’ to the tray. The two wine glasses on the mantelpiece act as evidence that two people - a couple – live in the home.

Symbolic signifiers include the two logos used to anchor the text (Changing Rooms and BBC). The flowers and wine can also be seen as symbolic signifiers of romance.

c) What does the room and its contents communicate about the woman’s identity? (10 marks)

The woman’s identity is being staged as a middle-aged, middle class home-maker. This has partly been created through the choice of female model, who is well groomed, slim and blond. It is also communicated through the props used to‘stage’ the woman’s identity: the minimalist furnishing of the room and its reliance on black & white colours which connote simplicity and sophistication. The paradigmatic choices made in selecting the fireplace, wine glasses & flowers help to create the syntagm of ‘the middle-class home’ – it all looks as though it has been plucked out of a Heals’ catalogue. This is what helps to communicate her socio-economic background. The books scattered on the hearth at the corner of the image signify an education and interest in the world. The carefully arranged lounge creates a calm, thoughtful and stylish identity for the woman. The choice of words such as ‘styling’ and ‘transform’ is also the language of women’s magazines, and helps to position the woman as the home-maker, anchoring her identity even further.

Question 4

Use your knowledge of communication and culture to explore the role played by self-knowledge in the creation and maintenance of personal identity. (20 marks)

How well we know ourselves is an important factor to consider when assessing the creation and maintenance of our personal identity. According to Cooley, it is partly through other people – and their reactions to us – that we gain self-knowledge in the first place. His ‘looking glass’ theory suggests that we use other people as mirrors through which we can see ourselves reflected. For example, we might try out a new outfit when with a friend to judge their reaction; as a result we might judge that outfit to be a success or not.

Gaining information about ourselves in this way, and reflecting on our strengths and weaknesses, successes and failures allows us to control the way we want the world to see us. It allows us to refine and project a sense of personal identity which reveals ourselves in the way we want to be seen. This process of editing out aspects of our selves which might be perceived as negative is known as gate-keeping. Many people engage in this everyday as they create and maintain pages on sites like Facebook and Bebo. People carefully include information and photos which help to maintain a sense of personal identity that they are happy with.

We can apply the Johari window to this process. If we know ourselves effectively, we also know what to reveal in our‘open self’ and what to conceal in our ‘hidden self.’ It might be that the more familiar and comfortable we feel with people, the happier we are to reveal ourselves more honestly, and the more our ‘open self’ expands. However, what we can’t control is our ‘blind self’ - those things about our self that others know but we don’t, or our ‘unknown self’- those things about our selves which have yet to reveal themselves to us or to others. Our own self-knowledge depends to an extent on how honestly we manage the feedback we get from others. Many of us use various self-maintenance strategies (Gergen & Gergen) to minimise the effect of feedback we perceive to be negative (for example, by rubbishing those who gave the feedback: ‘what does my teacher know anyway’) , rather than using negative feedback to reflect honestly on ourselves.

This leads to an interesting point, which is that our sense of personal identity is not a static and unchanging concept. We can never know everything about ourselves and as we experience more of life our self-image and the identity we want to present to the world changes too. As Goffman says, the roles we play in life partly determine our identity, and when we are ‘new’ to a role, it makes sense that a lack of self-knowledge means that our ‘blind self’ is likely to be larger until we have learned who to be in that role, partly through the process of feedback. This often happens when someone starts a new job, for example.

In addition, the sub-cultural groups that we identify with in life may well change as time passes. Our identification with a particular cultural or sub-cultural group will certainly influence how we construct a sense of identity and then knowingly present it to the world, as anyone who has decided to become a goth or a punk knows.

AS COMMS - revision materials

Here is a good website which provides an overview of some of the theories we have looked at regarding identity and self-presentation: click here

Goffman prezi here: click here

Johari window prezi here: click here

A2 Comms - 'Students of colour feel 'othered' at Oxford University'

An interesting article for PostColonialism: click here to read.

AS LangLit: Mother - modelling PETAR

These are the three paragraphs modelling PETAR that we created in class:

POINT
EVIDENCE
TECHNIQUE
ANALYSIS
RETURN TO THE QUESTION

In Mother’s first turn, we see her attitude towards Annie being revealed: ‘The only thing is I think her nose got longer.’ In this declarative, we see her insult Annie, perhaps to try and reduce her status in Chris’ eyes. Mother does not want to acknowledge that Annie is over Larry and creating barriers between Annie and Chris is one way of stopping this from happening.

Miller demonstrates that Mother is capable of manipulating the other characters in the play when she says ‘{directly at him} Like what, for instance?’ In this interrogative, she is trying to make Chris feel uncomfortable, almost daring him to admit that he has feelings for Annie. The paralanguage conveyed through the stage directions above can be seen as a form of intimidation.

In Mother’s penultimate turn, Miller shows us that she is still living in the past – haunted by Larry’s memory: ‘{She suddenly realises something, turns with a reprimanding finger shaking slightly at Keller}’. Here Miller uses paralanguage to demonstrate that Mother blames Keller for accepting too quickly that Larry is dead. This tells us that Mother has still not accepted that Larry is dead and clings to the hope that he may return.

A2 Lit - Patterns in coursework feedback

There are some notable patterns in the feedback I am giving you during our 1-1s:

- Make sure that each section / paragraph starts with a topic sentence, which links back to the previous section (probably through a comparative phrase) and makes its relevance to your thesis clear. Here's an example from Tolu's essay, who is doing the 'hopes/dreams/reality/suffering' question:

'Like Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, Pecola's dream means that she is forced to chase the inachievable, which in her case is her impractical desire to have blue eyes.'

So the link is made (red) first, then the new topic set up with clear reference to the question through 'dream', 'inachievable' & 'impractical desire'.

- Avoid using the words 'positive' or 'negative' in your essay: there are always better words you can use

- Don't allow your sentences to go on for too long, and make sure that you are not using commas where a full stop (or semi-colon) is needed

- Make sure that you remember to quote from your texts, and that you use punctuation to introduce the quote

- Have you written, in detail, about at least 3 Larkin poems?

- Are you modifying your arguments with words or phrases like 'Perhaps', 'It could be suggested that ...', 'Arguably', to make it clear that you are offering an interpretation rather than the truth?

- Don't just include secondary critics, use them - comment on them or use them to introduce a counterargument or new angle

- Remember that you can take on the question. You don't have to agree with it!

I suggest you watch the video on this blog which compares all three texts for context to make sure that you are covering all the bases which are relevant to your essay

AS LL - A great little video to watch

AS Comms - uploading audio to MovieMaker

We recommend converting your audio to WMV before uploading it to MovieMaker (this is relevant to those of you recording your audio on your phones). You can conver audio here:

http://audio.online-convert.com/convert-to-wma

MovieMaker seems to have a little bug which sometimes freezes projects once audio in other formats is uploaded.

 

Comms & Culture: Barbie & Gender

Here's an interesting article on the plan to create a new doll based on more realistic body proportions (compared to Barbie) - good to read for gender, power & socialisation: click here to read it

AS LL - All my Sons

Mother's character

Identify the key points made about Mother/Kate in this clip: do you agree? Why/why not?

Imagine you are the examiner and you have been told that the exam question for AMS is going to be on Mother. Choose the two pages that you think would be most appropriate for students to use in analysing the presentation of her character. Come up with 5 reasons for why your chosen extract is the best one to use.

A2 Comms - example podcast

Never speak to me about this; it is deeply embarrassing!

A2 Comms - sound effects for the podcast

The sound effects website can be found by clicking here: Free sound effects.