r/ALevelEnglishLit

Fk louise glück and her poems 🫩🫩🫩🫩🫩🫩

How did your exam go?? I did the sonnets, and was so glad the sonnet 116 was there for the passage based question. It was pretty insightful. I don’t know why, but the beloved part a question on Beloved was so easy, yet I chose to do part b (natural response :( ), realising midway that I hated it and didn’t know what to discuss, then went back to answering part a 😭😭😭. I was able to write only 4 pages, and the points were rather limited, I talked about hauntology and Jacques Derrida, and how the past comes to haunt, John Leonard and ghostly nature of beloved, gothic genre, multiple perspectives (polyphony), and African Myth Akibu (don’t ask me how, but I related it to beloved somehow). Wasn’t able to give a conclusion tho, but to hell with that, I’ve actually never seen examiner give a shit about conclusions lol. How did your paper go? What do you think the grade thresholds will be??

Um so like the title says i did one poetry question and one prose question both from section A accidentally instead of one from A and one from B, how cooked am i? I was a private candidate and i was preparing everything on my own so i didn't really have any guidance and i prepared pride and prejudice and walt whitman and i didnt know they were both under section A... i have not slept in days and my cat just died and my brain is genuinely so fried im so close to a breakdown i could not think about anything else, i didn't even realise they were under the same section until i finished paper or i would have attempted something from section B as unseen or anything but i couldnt and i know i mightve have messed up big time. But realistically how bad is this 😕 will i have to retake

Does anyone know what came up for time zones 43 and 42? Specifically pride and prejudice and native guard poem collection?? Good luck to all!!

Paper 4 is tomorrow, and for some reason I’ve gotten exam anxiety, thinking the way I write essays isn’t correct. For context I do Shakespeare’s Sonnets for Poetry and Beloved for Prose. How do you write your essays to b or a part questions??

How many marks on average do i need to get on all my essays to secure an A?

[edit: AQA, sorry forgot]
Okay so I've been desperately trying to find people to talk to about whether I should choose Dante's Inferno for one of my coursework texts. I've been told it'd be extremely hard and also there isn't really a good text to compare it to that is short or that it'd be equally as hard as Inferno.

I legit am not interested in any other text and wanna study it but don't wanna regret it halfway and realise I've just doomed myself. so basically I'm hoping some adult with expertise sees this cuz I need advice on if it is A-LEVEL FRIENDLY!!!!! (all texts I would've done are on the list that can't be done due to them being taught at a-level)

-for references, I've just got a penguin classics kirkpatrick ver of inferno and am a somewhat capable student with predicted A*'s in my other 2 subjects just Literature is killin me and I wanna actually read a book that I ENJOY.

Literally the title, ocr style pretty please with a cherry on top

People on here act like memorising 30 critics is what separates a B from an A* in English Lit, when honestly it’s probably one of the biggest wastes of revision time imaginable. Propaganda from our shit terrible english teachers in this system. You are the critic.

This is coming from someone who averages 24-25/25 comfortably. The entire point of literary criticism is to critique. To think perceptively. To produce an argument. (literally Ao5) Yet half this subreddit treats critics like Pokémon cards you collect and force into essays for AO5.

Examiners do NOT reward you for desperately name-dropping “Marxist readings” every paragraph. It rewards conceptualised, exploratory interpretation. Most top-band essays use critics sparingly because the student themselves is functioning AS the critic.

For example, in La Belle Dame sans Merci, I argued that the ending is unsettling because the cyclical return to “alone and palely loitering” collapses any real distinction between before and after the enchantment. Structurally, the knight may never have been meaningfully changed at all; the dream merely interrupts an existence already defined by sterility and emotional inertia. Even the blunt closure “and no birds sing” suggests that reality itself is spiritually barren, making the destructive enchantment paradoxically preferable to ordinary existence.

That interpretation did more for me than memorising 15 random opinions from JSTOR ever could, because it actually engages with the text instead of outsourcing thought to academics.

People revise critics because it feels academic. Maybe its procrastination, who knows. Actual high-level analysis is much harder because it requires original thought. Please please stop. And if anyone argues with this, i aint replying. Please do not not not not, at all. AT ALL. Waste time revising critics for p2

I lit wrote like 650 words max for the hamlet 35 marker but I wrote like 1.5k words for my 25 marker omg idk what happened...

for the 35 marker I included like 3/4 critics and argued against them and like did a bit of context and analyzed quotes like not too terribly...

apparently that's capped to a D or sum coz of the length... but i did do 3 paras but the first one was hella short... aaaaaaaa...

holy cooked

I do OCR English literature and for the second section of the paper I needed to do a comparison for Rossetti and Ibsen. I didn’t end up writing my third paragraph and my conclusion was only one sentence because I ran out of time !!
Does anyone know how many marks would be available to me cos of this?

Hello, any predictions for Pride and Prejudice or Louise Glück?

is it eng lit OR eng general paper or is it eng lit AND eng gen paper? my parent and i had a conversation with a teacher at school and shes throwing us off mainly bc she doesnt want to teach it, not one source ive found so far says that i absolutely need both subjects and before this the subject selection form sent by school basically put eng language, eng lit, eng general paper all in group 1 and maths and further maths in group 2. now since this teacher was hired, shes basically put eng lit in the same category as MATHS AND FURTHER MATHS and shes giving that as a reason to why i shouldnt take lit. im crashing out, each time i talk to her she says smth different, my principal doesnt seem to have an issue with me doing lit and so far none of this has been said by/in front of my principal, i really really want to do lit rn and im mostly going to major in lit in uni and i dont want to do 6 subjects (apparently eng gen paper OR eng language is compulsary and eng lit isnt in the same subject group as them so i absolutely need to take both eng lit and general paper). im sorry if this isnt coherent im genuinely losing my sanity over this the last 2 months, thank you.

Exactly as the title says.

Need to find 9695/F/M/26/42

is anyone else doing shakespeare sonnets? if so, how are you revising them? 😭 bc i genuinely can’t memorize all of them before the exam. any tips/tricks would help

I had panicked really bad in the morning and cried and refused to get up and was crying going into the exam which I believed messed up my timing so I did not do a question - I need an A* in English for uni so idk what to do

soo I did paper 3 Shakespeare and drama and I think I did well in the first section for Hamlet, but I fucked it up in the second section, I was only able to write an intro and two relatively long paragraph, is there still hope or should I just focus on working harder in paper 4? I was going to do that anyway though

I know it would probs limit my marks but does anyone have any idea by how many 💔

I ran out of time so I only wrote one paragraph for death of a salesman in section C and only one about isabella. plus the points weren't even that good I just spoke about how Linda is an enabler and then how the brothers and wider capitalist society are at fault. I was gonna put the eve of st agnes in there and it was in my plan at the start but I didn't get a chance to 😔 i lowk fucked it I wanted an A* but I guess it is what it is atp.

At least the other two questions went well 🙏 do we think I can bring it back in paper 2..

Does anyone know which extract came for pride and prejudice on the A2 Feb/March paper? Plssss answer soon my exam is in two days.