Win £500 being brilliant

Connell Guides Essay Prize 2015-16

Our Essay Prize is back! This year we have a new judge, the best-selling novelist Robert Harris, AND a new question:  Who is your favourite character from English literature and why? Is it, say, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando or plucky, headstrong Bathsheba from Far From the Madding Crowd? Or perhaps you prefer a contemporary character like Piscine Molitor Patel from Life of Pi or the enigmatic Jay Gatsby? Whoever it is, if you’re a sixth-form student studying English Literature (including Scottish Highers), then you now have an opportunity to make your case. The prize this year is £500, a full set of Connell Guides and your essay published! Two runners up will receive a £100 gift card to spend at Connell Guides.                                           Entries should be no more than 1,500 words and they should be submitted by 20th February 2016. Entries can be submitted from today.   Essays will be judged this year by Robert Harris, the author of Fatherland, Enigma and The Ghost. His latest thriller, An Officer and a Spy, is based on the infamous Dreyfus case in France in the late 1890s. Harris has been a strong supporter of Connell Guides from the outset, describing them as “clear, elegant and authoritative… worthy of the great masterpieces they analyse”. We are very pleased he has agreed to judge our essay competition this year.   Click here to read last year’s winning essay on Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem by Eleanor Winn. Here is Robert Harris talking about what he likes about Connell Guides:                              We look forward to reading your essays! With best wishes, The Connell Guides Team    www.connellguides.com Students: Get 15% off at our new online shop using code STUDENT15 Follow us on Twitter:  @connell_guides  |   Like us on Facebook

Allusions in The Waste Land

https://britlitwiki.wikispaces.com/Allusions+in+Eliot

TV program about Mrs Dalloway

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xELtm-1v4U – Secret Life of Books episode on Mrs Dalloway. Excellent and well worth a watch!

William Blake: a documentary

In case you're interested; apparently this is rather good.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qvx0on0Hj2I&feature=youtu.be&list=PLOin_0y20gjTOw__98PRr9AJ8QrcA-igQ

Narrative devices in Frankenstein

Easy, straightforward, and really good contextual points (whatever the question).


http://www.slideshare.net/NDimechkie/narrative-framing-devices-in-frankenstein

How to tell you're reading Gothic novels - in graphs

Great A04 revision for Frankenstein - reminds you what's unique, and not so unique, about Mary Shelley's tale.


http://www.theguardian.com/books/interactive/2014/may/09/reading-gothic-novel-pictures


Revision tip: as you read the link above, write notes on how Shelley a) conforms to and b) subverts Gothic conventions.

Short animation about Woolf

http://www.openculture.com/2015/09/an-animated-introduction-to-virginia-woolf.html

The Waste Land: readings

Your task: in groups of three, collate a visual and emotional response to your section.


Burial of the dead (pt 1)


A Game of Chess (pt 2)


The Fire Sermon (pt 3)


Death by Water (pt 4)


What the Thunder Said (pt 5)


It should be an illustrative companion to the poem, based on images and feelings alone.
We will put it up in 027.

A magical book about poetry

The Life of Poetry by Muriel Rukeyser. Stunning manifesto on the importance of poetry.

Summarised here:

http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/m_r/rukeyser/life.htm

Here's one paragraph I like a lot:

Everywhere we are told that our human resources are all to be used, that our civilization itself means the uses of everything it has the inventions, the histories, every scrap of fact. But there is one kind of knowledge  infinitely precious, time-resistant more than monuments, here to be passed between the generations in any way it may be: never to be used. And that is poetry.

Your Grayson Perry Links

Recent Grayson Perry exhibition:
https://www.turnercontemporary.org/exhibitions/grayson-perry


Grayson Perry's biography in Vogue:
http://www.vogue.co.uk/spy/biographies/grayson-perry-biography

Grayson Perry at the Saatchi gallery: http://www.saatchigallery.com/artists/grayson_perry.htm

Ode to a Grecian Urn - sparknotes

http://www.sparknotes.com/poetry/keats/section4.rhtml

The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock

Alan Yentob, in a Radio 4 documentary, discusses the work with psychologist Adam Phillips and singer Emmy the Great. It also features readings by Jeremy Irons, Ben Whishaw and Eliot himself.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05wxzxv


TS Eliot’s poem was first published on 15 June, 1915. To mark its centenary this year, artist Mat Collishaw has made a short film in response to the poem, which is read by Eliot himself.


http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02sryh5




Using your notes, and your understanding of the poem, answer the following question in two hours.


"What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?" - TS Eliot
In light of this statement, discuss the presentation of isolation in Preludes and The Love Song of Alfred J. Prufrock in your answer.


- Use a Socratic structure: 1) define the assumptions within the statement 2) prove the overall statement from different angles 3) challenge the overall statement from different angles 4) consider the consequences for humanity of what you've proved.

Why we like dystopian stories

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2015/sep/14/high-rise-director-ben-wheatley-tom-hiddleston

Gothic fiction and Romanticism online

This is a good site for understanding context, with a very slight religious bias:


http://crossref-it.info/articles/338/gothic-and-sensation-fiction




http://crossref-it.info/articles/category/10/the-world-of-the-romantics-1770-1837


That's two good links to explore, but the whole site is worth keeping right the way through to A2.

Interesting essay about writing novels by Virginia Woolf

http://www.columbia.edu/~em36/MrBennettAndMrsBrown.pdf

Prufrock cartoon

http://julianpeterscomics.com/page-1-the-love-song-of-j-alfred-prufrock-by-t-s-eliot/

Further reading on literature studies

Some recommended reading from the exam board...

● Baldick, C (2001) The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
● Eagleton, T (2013) How to Read Literature. Yale.
● Edgar, D (2009) How Plays Work. Nick Hearn Books.
● Drabble, M (2006) The Oxford Companion to English Literature: Revised.
● Hawthorn, J (2010) Studying the Novel, 6th edition. Bloomsbury.
● Lodge, D (2011) The Art of Fiction. Vintage.
● Mullan, J (2008) How Novels Work. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
● Padel, R (2004) 52 Ways of Looking at a Poem. Vintage.
● Sansom, P (1993) Writing Poems. Bloodaxe.

Three versions of Act 1 Scene 1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=clG8ha2D26g

In Our Time Radio discussions

The Waste Land and Modernity: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00hlb38


Literary Modernism: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00547fv

Reception theory

Following our interesting discussion today, a brief outline of reception theory. Anyone interested in more detail hould have a look at Stuart Hall: a famous (and the first!) cultural theorist who wrote a lot about class and race, and how these affect interpretations of texts.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reception_theory


Interesting background to Terry Eagleton here, too:
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/feb/02/academicexperts.highereducation

Why this book of poems?

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/mar/16/poems-of-the-decade-anthology-forward-prizes

Patience Agbabi: spoken word performances

Some of Patience Agbabi's other poems: very political, exploring poverty, race, and more. Amazing stuff.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j84k6rzhyFc


Collaborating with Howie B:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ym9wXqy6cM

Eat Me in performance

Here’s a performance by what’s apparently called poetry’s first pop group(!), featuring Patience Agbabi who wrote Eat Me. Her work emphasises the spoken word a lot so this might be fun to show!

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_pIbiZtKoE

Different voices in the Wasteland

http://hedothepolice.org/about/eliotvoicesanddrama.html