Study guide: Representing the Self and Nuclear Catastrophe

📋 Course Outline

1. The Great Depression and Its Art
2. Rushdie, Partition and Emergency
3. Art, Censorship and Street Culture
4. Pinter, Theatre and Political Speech
5. Kennedy and Churchill Speeches
6. British Romanticism and Its Legacy
7. British and American Romantic Legacies
8. Love, Identity, and Imagined Endings
9. Self-Portraits and Individual Identity
10. Autobiography, Identity and Initiation
11. Initiation and the Developing Novel
12. School, Teachers, and Learning
13. Exploration and the British Empire
14. Literary Exploration and the Frontier
15. Belonging and Cultural Legacy
16. American Film and Social Segregation
17. Migration, Culture, and Exclusion
18. Methods for Analysing Documents

📅 Key Dates

1. 1795The Bildungsroman genre began in Germany with the publication of Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship.
2. August 16, 1819a crowd of 40,000 to 50,000 gathered at St Peter’s Field in Manchester to demand parliamentary representation reform, and cavalry charged the crowd, causing hundreds of victims in the Peterloo Massacre.
3. November 1863Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address at the dedication ceremony for the National Cemetery of Gettysburg, held to remember the dead and complete the burials.
4. April 9, 1865Lee surrendered at Appomattox.
5. March 4, 1933Franklin Delano Roosevelt took office after being elected president in 1932.
6. May 13, 1940Churchill, who had replaced Chamberlain as Prime Minister on May 10, delivered his first speech as Prime Minister in the House of Commons.
7. 1961Kennedy sent troops to Vietnam disguised as military advisers.
8. September 12, 1962John Fitzgerald Kennedy delivered “We Choose to Go to the Moon” at Rice University in Houston.
9. 4 August 1964Lyndon Baines Johnson ordered the first American raid on communist positions, and Congress gave him full power to join the Vietnam War.
10. 5 October 2018After the auction hammer fell at Sotheby’s in London, a shredder built into the frame partly shredded Banksy’s Girl with Balloon.

📖 1. The Great Depression and Its Art

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Dust Bowl: A period of severe dust storms that damaged agriculture across the American prairies.

★ Must-know

• The 2019 English-specialist curriculum presents art, debate and ideas as open to varied interpretations and encourages students to connect artistic forms with debates in the English-speaking world. - The Bulletin Officiel, July 25th, 2019

📌 Artistic contestation may arise from an artist’s deliberate commitment, whereas anti-establishment meanings may also result from how audiences read a work in its social context.

• The Grapes of Wrath follows Tom Joad and his family as the Great Depression and Dust Bowl force them from their Oklahoma farm toward California in search of a better life.

📌 The Grapes of Wrath can be read as an epic journey, realistic fiction grounded in severe conditions and characters, and social commentary on hardship and misfortune.

📌 Would expresses a hypothetical situation, might expresses possibility, can expresses ability, will indicates the future, and can’t expresses impossibility.

• By the end of 1931, eight million Americans were unemployed, while banks closed, industrial production halved and wages fell by 60%.

• Three successive waves of drought, mainly in Texas and Oklahoma, struck in 1934, 1936 and 1939–40 and worsened farmers’ economic and social conditions.

• President Hoover’s lack of adaptation and reluctance to intervene worsened the crisis, which was initially treated as temporary and expected to be corrected by the market.

• Roosevelt’s New Deal laws expanded federal power and government intervention in the economy, agriculture, industry, finance and banking.

Further detail

• The course frames artistic study as developing cultural, literary and civilisational knowledge alongside critical thinking, tolerance of diverse viewpoints, and the ability to distinguish facts, beliefs and opinions.

• Art can give ideas impact by embodying them in characters, situations, images or sounds and arousing emotions such as indignation, laughter or enthusiasm.

• Artists may use their work to resist social or political discrimination, injustice, colonialism, war or progress, and their stance may be progressive, conservative, nostalgic or reactionary.

• Aesthetic choices can contribute to artistic involvement; the course mentions Laurence Sterne’s experimental writing in Tristam Shandy and street art.

• John Steinbeck received the Pulitzer Prize for The Grapes of Wrath in 1940, and the novel belongs to the Western Canon.

💡 Memory Hook

Drought and economic collapse → displacement, hardship and artistic testimony.

📖 2. Rushdie, Partition and Emergency

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Anti-war literature: Literature that debunks popular myths about war, unlike war literature, which presents soldiers as heroes and offers a patriotic ideal.

📝 Essential Points

• Anti-war literature can show the horrors, destruction, and brutality of war, expose its popular myths, or portray the personal aftermath that leaves a young soldier shattered; it does not glorify or romanticize battle or promote fascination with war.

• The course identifies Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895), Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961), Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, and Tim O’Brien’s “On the Rainy River” as works for studying anti-war literature.

• Catch-22 follows Captain Yossarian, a B-25 pilot sent to Pianosa in Italy, who pretends to be insane to avoid combat; the military rule called Catch-22 makes exemption impossible because wanting to avoid battle is treated as proof of sanity.

• The Allied bombing of Dresden from 13 to 15 February 1945 dropped 7,000 tons of bombs in three successive waves and killed 35,000 people; seven Americans survived, including Vonnegut, who sheltered in a cellar in the slaughterhouse he called Slaughterhouse Five.

• The Red Badge of Courage follows young Union recruit Henry Fleming, who deserts after the enemy counterattacks, encounters a corpse, returns to his regiment, and later distinguishes himself as a hero in battle.

📌 For Henry Fleming, courage first means earning praise from peers and is framed as leaving war with one’s shield or on it, but later becomes personal self-concern independent of others or reputation.

• Bob Dylan was an influential singer, anti-war protest figure, and informal social commentator in the United States; “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “The Times They Are a-Changin’” are identified as anti-war hymns against the Vietnam War.

• In 1954, the French were driven out of Vietnam by communist leader Ho Chi Minh; elections that were supposed to follow never took place, and Vietnam was divided into North Vietnam and South Vietnam.

• The United States entered the Vietnam War under Eisenhower’s “Domino Theory,” the fear that if one country fell under communist rule, others would follow.

• The Vietnam War lasted from 1955 to 1975 and opposed the Vietnam Democratic Republic, supported by China and the Eastern Bloc, to the Vietnam Republic, supported by the United States, Australia, South Korea, Thailand, and the Philippines.

• American opposition to the Vietnam War was unusually strong because battlefield photographs were sent home for the first time and horrified the public; napalm and Agent Orange and other deadly chemicals were used, and pictures showed children and women being burned.

• Rushdie’s literature is described as postcolonial magical realism, combining real, surreal, and mythic references without allowing one genre to dominate an entire novel.

📌 Magical realism combines fantastical elements with a real-world setting and everyday occurrences, whereas fantasy takes place in an imaginary world different from ours.

💡 Memory Hook

Magical realism joins everyday life to the fantastic; fantasy moves to an imaginary world.

📖 3. Art, Censorship and Street Culture

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Caste system: A ranked, strict, and codified social hierarchy in which people are classified according to the work they occupy and caste membership follows hereditary principles and endogamy.
• Graffiti: Words or drawings, especially humorous, rude, or political ones, placed on walls, doors, or other public places.
• Street art: Intended to make a personal statement about the society in which the artist lives and may express political or social commitment or simply display art.
• Britart: A movement of conceptual artists, painters, and sculptors, many of whom attended Goldsmiths College in London.
• Conceptual art: Gives primacy to the idea itself rather than the artist’s skill or the finished state of the work.

★ Must-know

• The four major castes are:

  • Brahmins (priests)
  • Kshatriyas (warriors and nobility)
  • Vaishyas (farmers, traders, and artisans)
  • Shudras (tenant farmers and servants)

• Dalits, formerly called “untouchables” or “the crushed ones,” were placed outside and below the caste system.

• Art controversies can concern aesthetic disputes, audience judgments about moral or political values, censorship, propriety, political correctness, and limits on access to works.

• The Turner Prize is a prominent visual-arts prize that selects four artists for outstanding exhibitions and is awarded to a British artist who works in Britain or was born there.

Further detail

• Dalits were described as the poorest and least educated people, associated with sullied jobs, and subject to contempt, violence, and discrimination, including historical exclusion from restaurants and temples.

• The love affair between Ammu, who belongs to a high caste, and Velutha, a Dalit, is condemned by society because of their caste difference.

• The course cites D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover as heretical for breaking taboos and works by Nadine Gordimer and André Brink as subversive political criticism related to apartheid.

• Censorship examples cited are:

  • Brave New World, censored on release in Ireland
  • The Catcher in the Rye, frequently forbidden in American libraries
  • Sherman Alexie’s The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian

📌 The course contrasts Banksy’s deliberate creation of controversy through the destruction of Girl with a Balloon with Oscar Wilde’s rejection of non-artistic criteria in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray and E. M. Forster’s decision not to publish Maurice during his lifetime.

• Graffiti can be traced to ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome, and modern graffiti artists commonly use spray paint and marker pens.

💡 Memory Hook

Graffiti is often treated as an infraction, while street art can gain recognition as art.

📖 4. Pinter, Theatre and Political Speech

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living: A work depicting a dead shark preserved in formaldehyde.
• Realism: The direct observation of human behaviour, often using contemporary settings and characters from lower social classes.
• Theatre of the Absurd: A post-Second World War theatre that deals with existentialism, uses circular structures without an ending, and moves from irrational speech toward silence.
• Rhetoric: The science and art of speech that develops communication abilities and turns them into an art.

📝 Essential Points

• For the Love of God is a skull sculpture decorated with 8,601 diamonds, including a large pear-shaped diamond at the centre of the forehead, and was estimated to be worth £50 million.

• Mother and Child Divided displays a cow and calf cut lengthwise in four formaldehyde-filled cases, while Some Comfort Gained from the Acceptance of the Inherent Lies in Everything displays a cow cut into twelve cross-sections in twelve cases that viewers can walk among.

• Emin’s artistic practice included:

  • painting
  • sculpture
  • sewing
  • drawing
  • performance
  • film

• In My Bed (1999), Emin displayed personal objects, including used condoms, blood-stained underwear and medicine boxes, as testimony to her life after depression rather than concealing or embellishing reality.

• Harold Pinter (1930–2008) was a prominent post-war English dramatist who grew up in London’s East End and fled during the London bombing.

• The Birthday Party was Pinter’s first full-length play produced in London in 1958, but its 1959 run lasted only one week.

• In The Birthday Party, Goldberg and McCann interrogate Stanley, accuse him of betrayal and murder, and increasingly unsettle him; at the party Stanley is blindfolded and molested, later tries to strangle Meg, and is found attempting to assault Lulu; after his breakdown, the men prepare to take him to a doctor despite Petey’s protest.

📌 The Birthday Party is described by Pinter as a political play concerned with obedience, oppression and freedom, while the interrogation’s apparent reasonableness masks palpable physical and verbal violence.

• Pinter received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005 and had written twenty-nine plays.

📌 Rhetoric can use mastery of words to persuade and move an audience, or to manipulate through propaganda.

• Public-speaking skills include:
  • confidence
  • language mastery
  • posture
  • an extensive vocabulary
  • repartee

📌 To understand a speech, place it in its historical, social or political context and identify its purpose by asking what, when, where and who.

💡 Memory Hook

Realism observes behaviour; absurd theatre turns irrational speech toward silence.

📖 5. Kennedy and Churchill Speeches

★ Must-know

• The Battle of Gettysburg was the largest battle ever fought in the United States, with more than 50,000 men killed or wounded, and the Confederate defeat left the army unable to recover.

📌 The Gettysburg Address was initially seen as a statement of what the North was fighting for and later as an expression of faith in democratic values.

• Kennedy promised that an American would land on the Moon before the end of the 1960s as part of the Apollo program.

• Churchill vowed to fight:

  • on the beaches
  • in the fields
  • in the streets
  • on the hills

• In 12 Angry Men, a jury debates whether a young man accused of murdering his father is guilty, and a guilty verdict would lead to his execution.

• The verdict in 12 Angry Men must be unanimous, but Juror 8 is the only juror who doubts the young man’s guilt and tries to rally the others.

• After the law firm learns that Andrew Beckett has AIDS, it dismisses him on the stated ground of professional malpractice.

📌 In Philadelphia, the courtroom lawyer succeeds in establishing that Beckett’s dismissal was really about his illness and sexuality, not genuine professional malpractice.

• Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) is set in Alabama in the 1930s, where segregation and the separate-but-equal law discriminated against Black people.

• In To Kill a Mockingbird, court-appointed lawyer Atticus Finch defends Tom Robinson, a Black man accused of raping Mayella Ewell, a White woman supported by her father, Bob Ewell.

• Although Tom Robinson’s innocence appears clear, he is convicted and imprisoned, then shot when he tries to escape.

Further detail

• Abraham Lincoln took office as the 16th President of the United States on March 4, 1861, and the Civil War began the following month.

💡 Memory Hook

Kennedy offers collaboration with the USSR; Churchill rejects submission to Germany

📖 6. British Romanticism and Its Legacy

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Romanticism: A literary, artistic, and intellectual movement that originated in Germany with the poems of Goethe and Schiller at the end of the 18th century and became widespread in the first half of the 19th century.
• Industrial Revolution: The transition to new manufacturing processes in Europe and the United States, roughly from 1760 to 1840, including the shift from hand production to machines, new chemical and iron production, increased steam and water power, machine tools, and mechanized factories.

★ Must-know

• Romantic works focus on the writer’s inner life and celebrate nature, the common person, and the expression of emotion; they associate individual experience and spiritual elevation with isolation and melancholy.

📌 British Romanticism reacted against the Industrial Revolution’s encroachment on Nature, the Enlightenment’s emphasis on reason rather than emotion, and neoclassicism’s tempered, ordered representations of Nature.

• The Lyrical Ballads, a collection by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was first published in 1798 and is generally considered the beginning of the English Romantic movement in literature.

📌 Coleridge distinguished fancy, which associates existing emotions, images, and thoughts from perception or memory, from imagination, which creatively makes something new from what the subject perceives.

• In “The Mask of Anarchy,” Hope intervenes and kills Anarchy, after which threatened innocents turn to justice, peace, and love to achieve freedom.

📌 “The Mask of Anarchy” can be read as a call for freedom and nonviolent resistance and differs from first-generation Romantic poems by focusing on the collective rather than the individual.

• J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851) was an English Romantic painter, printmaker, and watercolourist, known for expressive colour, imaginative landscapes, and turbulent, often violent marine paintings.

• In Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps, Turner depicts movement, light and darkness, and tiny, indistinguishable soldiers in the same colors as the ground against huge, threatening nature; Hannibal is absent, focusing attention on the soldiers and vulnerable humanity.

• Turner’s The Burning of the Houses of Parliament depicts the fire of 1834 in warm colors that convey heat; the fire is the painting’s real subject, while the mass of unidentified people emphasizes human powerlessness and insignificance before the sublime force of nature.

Further detail

• The course describes Romanticism as an artistic movement in which emotion can serve as material for constructing a work, personality, and identity.

• The course associates Romantic expression of emotion with: communion with Nature in William Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”, mourning in Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee”, passionate love leading to madness in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights

• The course contrasts artists who illuminate intense, violent emotions—including Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Emily Dickinson, Sylvia Plath, William Turner, and Francis Bacon—with artists such as Mary Cassatt, Edward Hopper, and Grant Wood, who treat emotion with greater restraint.

• The course names these British Romantic poets by generation:

  • first generation: William Blake
  • first generation: William Wordsworth
  • first generation: Samuel Taylor Coleridge
  • second generation: George Byron
  • second generation: Percy Shelley
  • second generation: John Keats

💡 Memory Hook

Industrialization and reason-centered Enlightenment → Romantic emphasis on nature, emotion, and individual experience.

📖 7. British and American Romantic Legacies

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Transcendentalism: An American philosophical and artistic movement that developed in the eastern United States in the late 1820s and 1830s; it emphasizes the inherent goodness of people and nature, society’s corruption of the individual, and individual independence and self-reliance.

📝 Essential Points

• Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights was published in 1847 under the pseudonym “Ellis Bell”; it was her only completed novel and was accepted by the sisters’ publisher before Charlotte’s Jane Eyre.

• Wuthering Heights is set at the isolated farmhouse of that name in early nineteenth-century England and follows multiple generations through love and revenge.

• The central relationships in Wuthering Heights involve Heathcliff, the farmhouse owner; Lockwood, who recounts his visit; Earnshaw, who adopted Heathcliff; Catherine, who falls in love with Heathcliff; Edgar Linton, Catherine’s wealthy neighbor and husband; and Edgar’s sister, who marries Heathcliff.

• The main subject of Wuthering Heights is Heathcliff and Catherine’s doomed love and Heathcliff’s revenge after Catherine’s death.

• Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre was first published in three volumes as Jane Eyre: An Autobiography under the pen name “Currer Bell.”

• Jane is an unconventional, independent and self-reliant heroine who overcomes adversity and social norms; the novel innovatively addresses women’s strength and independence in a Victorian society that represented women as inferior to men.

📌 Jane Eyre blends moral realism, seen in Jane’s choice between sexual need and ethical duty, with Gothic elements, including her near bigamous marriage and Bertha’s fiery death.

• Jane Eyre’s plot follows Jane from orphanhood and mistreatment at Lowood to governess work at Thornfield, where she falls in love with Rochester; after discovering his existing marriage to Bertha, she refuses to live with him outside marriage and flees, later returns after hearing his call, and marries him after Bertha’s death and Rochester’s blinding.

• Tennyson wrote “In Memoriam A.H.H.” between 1843 and 1850; it was first published anonymously and consists of a prologue, 131 sections and an epilogue.

• “In Memoriam A.H.H.” is an elegy mourning Tennyson’s close friend Arthur Henry Hallam, who died aged twenty-two; the poem achieved major critical and popular success and earned Tennyson Queen Victoria’s friendship.

• “In Memoriam” uses four-line ABBA stanzas in iambic tetrameter, a regular form often interpreted as imitating the heartbeat of grief.

• Jane Campion’s 2009 film Bright Star is based on the last three years of John Keats’s life and his relationship with Fanny Brawne; its title refers to Keats’s poem “Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art.”

• Graham developed contraction and release to emphasize a baser aspect of human movement; each movement could express positive or negative, freeing or constricting emotion depending on head placement.

📌 Graham’s weighted, grounded technique, later incorporating spiral movement for fluidity, contrasts with classical ballet’s typical aim of creating weightlessness.

• Martin Luther King’s 1963 “I have a dream” uses anaphora to emphasize the orator’s emotion and trigger emotion in the audience.

💡 Memory Hook

British Romantic inheritance meets American self-reliance

📖 8. Love, Identity, and Imagined Endings

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Existentialism: A philosophical doctrine that treats human life’s essence as undetermined in advance and created through personal choices, individual existence, and actions.
• Stream of consciousness: A literary style that depicts a character’s emotions as they are experienced through long, continuous texts without obvious structure, aiming to represent the immediate and spontaneous flow of impressions felt or perceived.
• Sense of an Ending: In The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (1967), English literary scholar Frank Kermode argues that people seek continuity between past, present, and future to make sense of life, but because the future is unknowable they must imagine an ending.
• Climate swerve: An unpredictable major psychological shift in consciousness; in this context it concerns Americans’ relationship to global warming.
• Climate fiction: Literature dealing with global warming and climate change; the term was first used in 2013, although such fiction existed earlier, and Dan Bloom is identified as a prominent writer in the genre.
• Cold War: A period of geopolitical tension between the Soviet Union and the United States and their respective Eastern Bloc and Western Bloc allies, generally dated from the 1947 Truman Doctrine to the 1991 dissolution of the Soviet Union.

📝 Essential Points

• “Annabel Lee,” Poe’s last poem, was published shortly after his death in 1849. - Edgar Allan Poe, “Annabel Lee”

• Virginia Woolf (1882–1951) was an English modernist novelist, essayist, publisher, and critic, and was among the first to use stream of consciousness as a narrative device. - To the Lighthouse, 1927

• Emily Dickinson was born in 1830 in Amherst, New England, in a puritan and communitarian family; she began living as a recluse in her thirties, fell sick in 1864, and died in 1886.

• A Streetcar Named Desire follows Blanche Dubois, a schoolteacher who leaves Mississippi after losses and misfortunes to live with her sister Stella in New Orleans, hoping to begin again. - Tennessee Williams, 1947

• In After the End: Representations of Post-apocalypse (1999), James Berger argues that American culture has long sensed or been warned that the Apocalypse is near, yet the end never comes without leaving something behind.

• 🔄 The course describes this sequence (Robert Jay Lifton, 2017):

  1. Failure to understand and accept the threat
  2. Fear, uncertainty, and difficulty imagining future catastrophe
  3. Distorted perception and normalization of danger
  4. Denial or deliberate falsification of data
  5. Government inaction

📌 Once collective awareness and recognition of climate dangers grow, Lifton argues for collective action. - Robert Jay Lifton, The Climate Swerve: Reflections on Mind, Hope and Survival, 2017

• Raymond Briggs, a British artist, wrote the graphic novel When the Wind Blows in 1982.

• When the Wind Blows depicts a Soviet nuclear attack on Britain during the Cold War through the experiences of retired couple Jim and Hilda Bloggs.

• 🔄 The couple’s response unfolds in this order:

  1. They hear a warning on the radio.
  2. They build a fallout shelter.
  3. They take refuge when missiles approach England.
  4. They leave the next day after misunderstanding the advice to stay sheltered.
  5. They are exposed to radioactive fallout.

📖 9. Self-Portraits and Individual Identity

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Aestheticism: A nineteenth-century intellectual and artistic movement that values beauty above politics, commitment, and social questions.
• Comedy of manners: Comedy of manners, also called anti-sentimental comedy, satirizes contemporary social manners and questions society’s standards, often using stock characters to represent stereotypes; witty dialogue and sharp social commentary matter more than plot.

📝 Essential Points

• The course frames artistic self-representation as a way to investigate identity and life’s meaning, construct a public persona, influence how one is remembered, reflect on one’s art, represent collective identity, or challenge accepted representations. - The Bulletin Officiel, July 25th, 2019

• Hockney’s self-portraits aim for naturalness: he does not pose or try to look good, but records the act of looking in a mirror and painting what he sees.

• Wilde became associated with Aestheticism and Art for Art’s sake, and built his social identity through witty conversation and flamboyant dandy clothing and behavior.

• In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Basil Hallward paints Dorian, whose beauty inspires the painter; Dorian adopts Lord Henry Wotton’s hedonistic worldview, wishes his portrait would age instead of him, and remains young while the portrait grows uglier with each sin; seeking absolution, he stabs the portrait, and his servants find his disfigured body beside the restored portrait.

• Bowie’s alter egos, especially Ziggy Stardust, fed his music, and he repeatedly reinvented himself through avatars, fashion, and transvestism.

• The course distinguishes self-portraits intended to secure posterity from self-portraits that reveal or investigate identity, whether through fiction or autobiography.

• Franklin’s Autobiography has four parts: the first addresses his son William and covers childhood, family, and apprenticeship to his brother; the second follows letters urging him to continue and discusses public-library plans and thirteen virtues; the third covers mainly professional life, inventions, and diplomacy; and the fourth, shorter part focuses mainly on political life.

• Churchill’s My Early Life (1930) covers his life from birth to 1902, including childhood, schooldays, soldiering, and experience in the House of Commons.

• Maier’s self-portraits, mostly black and white, reveal little of her personality and use mirrors, reflections, and shadows to show her as a presence observing people or simply being there.

• Orwell identifies these motives for writing:

  • egoism
  • aesthetic enthusiasm
  • historical impulse
  • political purpose

• In One Writer’s Beginnings, Welty explores how her childhood relationships with her parents and her life in Mississippi influenced her writing and the construction of her personality and identity.

• Confessions of a Young Man presents itself as a novel about a protagonist named Dayne but is autobiographical, recounting Moore’s life in Paris in his teens and twenties and ending with his return to London.

• Woody Allen, whose real name is Allan Stewart Konigsberg, is an American film director, writer, actor and comedian born in 1935.

• Allen is best known for comedy of manners, sometimes with a psychoanalytical subtext, although he also tries other genres.

📖 10. Autobiography, Identity and Initiation

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• American Abolitionist Movement: Movement that argued for the immediate end of slavery in the United States before and during the Civil War, seeking both to free enslaved people and to end the slave trade.
• Slave narrative: Literary genre consisting of written autobiographical accounts by former slaves.
• Metaphor: Figure of speech that makes an implicit comparison between two things.
• Simile: Figure of speech that makes a direct comparison between two things using words such as “like” or “as”.
• Harlem Renaissance: Cultural and intellectual movement of the 1920s that profoundly influenced the United States and the world.
• Jim Crow laws: Segregationist laws that oppressed Black people in the South.
• Segregation: Segregation means separating people by race; Jim Crow laws legalized it, and separate facilities in the South, such as drinking fountains and bathrooms, were not in fact equal.

📝 Essential Points

📌 A biography is an account of someone’s life written by another person, whereas an autobiography is written by the person whose life it recounts.

• Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), enslaved in Maryland, escaped and became an abolitionist leader in Massachusetts and New York, as well as an acclaimed orator and writer.

• Frederick Douglass’s A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845) was his best-known autobiography and influenced the abolitionist movement.

• The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian (2007), although fictional, is shaped by the historical oppression of Native Americans; the reservation system is described as destructive through poverty, lack of opportunity, disease, alcoholism and hopelessness. - Sherman Alexie

• The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is a first-person graphic novel about fourteen-year-old Arnold Spirit Jr., who lives on a reservation. - Sherman Alexie, 2007

• Common characteristics include: identity struggles, colorful, creative language, freedom and independence, religious imagery, songs, settings and the dominance of the Black church, questioning Black people’s place in white-dominant society

• Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), his first novel, is semi-autobiographical and deals with racial injustice. - James Baldwin

• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) begins in the segregated Jim Crow South in the early twentieth century and ends in San Francisco shortly after World War II, presenting the effects of systemic segregation and racism on Black people’s minds, bodies and identities. - Maya Angelou

• During the Great Migration, many Black people left the South because of racism and limited opportunities and relocated to other parts of the United States.

💡 Memory Hook

Childhood, adolescence, then adult experiences shape initiation

📖 11. Initiation and the Developing Novel

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Bildungsroman: A Bildungsroman, also called a novel of education or novel of apprenticeship, focuses on the protagonist's psychological, intellectual, and moral growth.
• Picaresque novel: A genre born in sixteenth-century Spain, generally narrated in the first person in a fake autobiographical style, about an outcast or destitute hero whose extravagant adventures bring encounters with people from all social classes.
• Didactic art: Art that instructs and informs its audience and often conveys a moral comment on society or a truth.

★ Must-know

• Painful and brutal experiences, including loss, childhood cruelty, adult violence, and failed learning, can contribute to an individual's initiation and growth.

• Fielding's The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling (1749) is a comic novel and a reference in English literature, combining the Bildungsroman and picaresque genres.

• Oliver Twist realistically and unromantically depicts mid-nineteenth-century society, including criminals' sordid lives and the cruel treatment of orphans, while criticizing Victorian hypocrisy through the evolution of an innocent child mistreated by society.

• George Eliot's The Mill on the Floss (1860) follows Maggie Tulliver and her brother Tom in Lincolnshire around the 1830s, focusing on Maggie's development through relationships with Tom, Philip Wakem, and Stephen Guest and her emotional struggle between passions and circumstances.

• Pygmalion criticizes Victorian social hierarchy and prompts reflection on its impact and on the possibilities of climbing the social ladder.

Further detail

• Examples of painful initiation include: loss in Peter Docter's Inside Out, childhood cruelty and lost innocence in William Golding's Lord of the Flies, adult-world violence in Mark Twain's novels, adult-world violence in London Foundling Museum collections, accounts of children's evacuation during the Blitz, Lewis Hine's child-labor photographs

• In Frank Capra's Wonderful Life, learning ends in a failure that the protagonist must overcome in order to grow up.

• Henry Fielding (1707–1754) was an English dramatist and novelist known for humorous, satirical, and comic writing.

• In The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, characters leave Paradise Hall in Somersetshire after a family conflict, experience separate adventures on the road, and meet again in London for the plot's resolution.

• Its realism and metatextual reflection use:

  • realistic descriptions
  • addresses to the reader
  • rhetorical effects
  • irony

• The word Bildungsroman combines the German words Bildung, meaning education or construction, and Roman, meaning novel.

• Karl Morgenstern coined the term Bildungsroman in 1819.

💡 Memory Hook

Loss or conflict → experience → maturity

📖 12. School, Teachers, and Learning

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Carpe diem: Latin for seize the day; Keating uses it to urge students to make their lives extraordinary, make the most of the present rather than dwell on the future, and enjoy life while they can.
• Independent clause: Clause that forms a complete thought and can be used by itself.
• Dependent clause: Clause that does not form a complete thought and cannot be used by itself.
• Tuck-box: A small pinewood trunk that locks with a key and is used to store food and treats.
• Matilda: Matilda is the story of a little girl who flourishes with help from her teacher, Miss Honey.

📝 Essential Points

• Thomas Hughes's Tom Brown's School Days (1857), partly based on the author's and his brother's experiences, recounts school life and influenced the British school-novel genre.

📌 The course contrasts UK schooling through early schooling at age four, a wide-ranging curriculum, and GCSE and A-level end-of-year exams with US schooling through an end-of-high-school exam, national exams, a high-school diploma, greater specialization, and emphasis on examination.

• Peter Weir's Dead Poets Society (1989) portrays unconventional teacher John Keating, whose influence encourages students to appreciate art and pursue their passions.

• The course presents school as teaching social skills, respect, self-worth, empathy, personal potential, goal pursuit, communication, curiosity, the courage to ask questions, and how to study and think through writing and discussion.

📌 A complex sentence contains an independent clause and one or more dependent clauses, whereas a compound sentence links several independent clauses.

• Roald Dahl (1916–1990) was a Welsh writer famous for books for children and young adults.

• Dahl believed children’s stories should be entertaining and fast-paced.

• In Dahl’s stories, children typically get revenge on adults.

📌 Dahl described Boy: Tales of Childhood as a collection of remembered childhood events, not an autobiography, because he thought biographies contained too many uninteresting details.

📌 Although school is supposed to be a place of learning, it is the opposite for Matilda, who is understimulated and subjected to the cruelty of the headmistress, Miss Trunchbull.

• 🔄 The plot proceeds in this order:
  1. Matilda starts at Crunchem Hall Primary School
  2. Miss Trunchbull forces Bruce Bogtrotter to eat a huge chocolate cake
  3. Lavender puts a large newt in Miss Trunchbull’s drinking glass
  4. Matilda discovers her special powers
  5. Matilda visits Miss Honey’s cottage
  6. Matilda makes plans to help Miss Honey
  7. Matilda loses her ability to move objects with her mind
  8. Miss Honey adopts Matilda and they live together

💡 Memory Hook

Keating inspires independent thought, while Nolan enforces strict authority

📖 13. Exploration and the British Empire

📝 Essential Points

• World War II began in September 1939 when Nazi Germany, led by Adolf Hitler, invaded Poland.

• In December 1941, Japan attacked Pearl Harbor.

• Germany surrendered in May 1945, shortly after Adolf Hitler committed suicide.

• On 6 August 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan.

• In All the Light We Cannot See, Anthony Doerr explores identity, morality, and hope through two children on opposite sides of World War II.

• The storylines of All the Light We Cannot See converge during the bombing of Saint-Malo, illustrating that war can victimize children or adults, innocent or guilty, French or German.

📌 In All the Light We Cannot See, Frederick shows humanism by choosing not to dump water on a prisoner, while Werner realizes that he has the power to choose humane action rather than accept conditioning toward purity and nationalism.

• Mary Ann Shaffer's The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society follows writer Juliet as she bonds with Guernsey residents, learns their wartime secrets, and grows attached to the island, its book club, and Dawsey.

• The English-speaking world has been shaped by travel and frontiers in the context of expansion and colonization, whose consequences affected both lands of departure and arrival.

• Examples of explorers, expeditions, and writers include:

  • David Livingstone
  • Mary Kingsley
  • the Lewis and Clark expedition
  • Rudyard Kipling
  • Chinua Achebe
  • Joseph Conrad

📌 Exploration can concern a nation, a group, or an individual, and an individual's exploration can become an inward quest for self-understanding.

• The British Empire comprised: dominions, colonies, protectorates, mandates, other territories ruled or administered by the United Kingdom and its predecessor states

• By 1913, the British Empire ruled over 412 million people, or 23% of the world's population at the time.

• By 1920, the British Empire covered 35,500,000 km², or 24% of Earth's total land area.

• Mary Kingsley (1862–1900) was an English writer and explorer who traveled to Africa in 1892 after her parents died, aiming to learn about its people and finish her father's book.

• The Lewis and Clark expedition (1804–1806) was the first American land expedition to cross the continent from the East Coast to the Pacific Ocean.

💡 Memory Hook

Scientific aims contrast with Scott’s ambition to reach the South Pole first.

📖 14. Literary Exploration and the Frontier

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Manifest Destiny: The belief in the United States’ God-given mission to lead the world’s transition to democracy, an idea that motivated American expansion.
• Frontier: The “uncivilized,” wild, and “unconquered” part of the continent.
• Noble savage: A literary stock character representing an Indigenous outsider or “other” supposedly uncorrupted by civilization and therefore embodying humanity’s innate goodness.
• Melange: Found only on the desert planet Arrakis and necessary for space navigation because it enhances mental abilities and gives foresight.

★ Must-know

• Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) reflects Carroll’s interest in wordplay, logic, and fantasy and anticipates his nonsense writing.

• Alice’s curiosity drives her to follow unfamiliar or unusual creatures, making exploration and discovery the main motives of her journey.

• John Louis O’Sullivan, a popular editor and columnist, articulated the idea of Manifest Destiny in an 1845 essay advocating the addition of Texas to the United States.

• The Border Trilogy explores adventure and exploration by adapting and relocating the frontier myth to Mexico.

• Mining on Pandora threatens the existence of the Na’vi, and Avatar draws on colonization history and its effects on Indigenous peoples and their culture.

• Through exploration and discovery, Huck learns to think for himself and question the moral ideas taught by slave owners; until the turning point in chapter 15, his conscience troubles him for helping Jim, but he then recognizes that “right” and “wrong” are subjective and rejects his prior moral teaching.

• 🔄 Coraline’s adventure unfolds in this order:

  1. Coraline moves into an old house and discovers a mysterious bricked-up door
  2. She enters the Other World despite warnings because curiosity outweighs fear
  3. She finds familiar people and objects, but the Other people have buttons for eyes
  4. The Other Mother offers her a permanent stay if buttons are sewn into her eyes
  5. Coraline returns home and discovers that her parents have been kidnapped
  6. She returns, tricks the Other Mother, and saves her parents

• In Millhauser’s “In the Penny Arcade” (1986), a boy revisits an amusement park for his birthday, initially feels disappointed by its deterioration and lost mystery, then sees its creatures come alive as his childhood imagination returns.

• Star Trek follows the starship Enterprise and its crew on a five-year space-exploration mission to discover new civilizations and worlds and go “where no man has gone before,” reflecting the American impulse to explore.

• Christopher Nolan’s 2014 science-fiction film Interstellar follows astronauts and scientists sent through a wormhole near Saturn to find a new planet as Earth becomes uninhabitable.

• Interstellar explores both space and knowledge by raising questions that remain unresolved in theoretical physics.

Further detail

• Lewis Carroll was the pen name of Charles Dodgson (1832–1898), an English writer, amateur photographer, and mathematics teacher who lived and worked in Oxford, England.

📖 15. Belonging and Cultural Legacy

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Celtic Revival: 19th- and 20th-century movements expressing renewed interest in Celtic culture, especially in Ireland, through literature, art, and language
• Irish Literary Revival: a prominent manifestation of the Celtic Revival, involving Irish literary talents that emerged in the late 19th and early 20th centuries
• Highland Games: Scottish events celebrating Highland culture through symbols and activities including bagpipes, kilts, drumming, dancing, and heavy events such as the caber toss
• Highland Clearances: the mass eviction of Highland populations by landlords seeking more land for cattle during the 18th and 19th centuries, forcing Highlanders to move to the coasts
• Poppy Day: a Commonwealth memorial day commemorating soldiers who died in World War I on November 11th
• Notting Hill Festival: an annual London event held on the last Sunday and Monday of August since 1966 and led by the British West Indian community, meaning UK residents of Caribbean descent
• Modernism: a literary movement that broke with traditional poetry and prose fiction and experimented with techniques such as stream of consciousness, interior monologue, and multiple points of view
• Southern Renaissance: a literary movement of the 1920s and 1930s, including writers such as William Faulkner and Tennessee Williams, that reinvigorated American Southern literature

📝 Essential Points

• The Bulletin Officiel (n°8, July 25th, 2019) explains that in the English-speaking world, migration makes territorial belonging and cultural legacy central to individual and collective identity.

• Preserving heritage in immigrant communities maintains links with the native country while enriching the receiving country, as illustrated by London’s Notting Hill Festival.

• For some Indigenous peoples in Australia, New Zealand, the United States, and Canada, defending territory and preserving threatened cultural and environmental heritage is a matter of survival.

• Claims to cultural or social integration can lead to polemics, excesses, xenophobia, and nationalist withdrawal.

• William Butler Yeats (1865–1939), an Irish poet, helped launch the Irish Literary Revival by writing and publishing Irish writings while travelling between Dublin and London.

• Before Scott’s writing, the Highlands were viewed as poor, barren, backward, and inhabited by uncivilized people; Scott helped recast them as romantic, picturesque, inventive, and inhabited by loyal men.

• Before the Southern Renaissance, Southern writers tended to idealize the Antebellum South and the Confederate Lost Cause; Southern Renaissance writers challenged that vision and addressed racial issues, Southern history, and loss of identity within conservative Southern culture.

• The Sound and the Fury depicts the dehumanizing treatment of Black people by white people, while Dilsey represents morality and sanity and the white characters are portrayed as brutal, racist, disrespectful, and ignorant.

💡 Memory Hook

Cultural legacy can unite communities, but identity claims can also fuel exclusion.

📖 16. American Film and Social Segregation

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Naturalism: A literary movement that began in the late 19th century, rejected Romanticism, and emphasized determinism, scientific objectivism, and social commentary.
• Pastoral literature: A genre that portrays shepherds living simple, humble, rustic lives away from city life, its realities, and its corruption.

★ Must-know

• In Far From the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy depicts the rural life of Wessex in an almost pastoral setting, described in striking detail.

• Do the Right Thing is a 1989 American comedy-drama about racial tensions in Brooklyn and their consequences.

• 🔄 The conflict unfolds as follows:

  1. Buggin’ Out asks Sal to add pictures of Black celebrities to the Wall of Fame.
  2. Sal refuses, and tensions escalate into a fight.
  3. Police kill Raheem.
  4. Mookie breaks the pizzeria window with a can.
  5. The crowd destroys the restaurant.
  6. Smiley places a picture on the remains of the Wall of Fame.
  7. Mookie and Sal reconcile.

📌 Martin Luther King viewed violence as self-defeating, whereas Malcolm X considered violence potentially necessary for self-defense.

• The Wire is an American crime drama series broadcast from 2002 to 2008 that examines crime in Baltimore through the perspectives of residents, police, journalists, criminals, and teachers.

• The seasons focus respectively on:

  • season 1: police and drug dealers
  • season 2: the harbor and smuggling
  • season 3: political struggles
  • season 4: education and children
  • season 5: the media

• Kennedy uses religious language to describe migration, including the search for freedom of worship by people fleeing religious persecution. - John F Kennedy, A Nation of Immigrants, 1958

• Migrants also fled poverty and unemployment, but despite their hopes they encountered little tolerance, discrimination, and hostility in the United States.

• Migrants chose America for greater job opportunities and less poverty, believing that staying in their home countries would leave them poor and that going to America could give them a chance to become rich.

• Different causes of migration included:

  • lack of economic opportunities
  • political oppression
  • religious persecution

• Ellis Island processed 12 million immigrants between 1892 and 1954.

Further detail

• Naturalism began in France with Émile Zola.

• Far From the Madding Crowd follows Bathsheba Everdene, a newcomer to a Wessex village who has several admirers but initially refuses them because she values her independence more than them.

• After accepting marriage and being betrayed, Bathsheba eventually marries the kind man she had first refused.

💡 Memory Hook

King rejects violence as self-defeating, whereas Malcolm X allows it for self-defense.

📖 17. Migration, Culture, and Exclusion

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Apartheid: Institutionalized racial segregation in South Africa and South West Africa, now Namibia, from 1948 until the early 1990s.

★ Must-know

• Obstacles at Ellis Island included:

  • surveillance
  • long waits
  • large numbers of migrants
  • tags on migrants’ clothes
  • men, women, and children together

• The Statue of Liberty symbolized liberty and welcome, but migrants could still face dire living conditions and rejection because of religion or language—the same reasons many had migrated.

• In West Side Story’s “America,” the women continue to dream of a better life, whereas the men believe the American Dream is unavailable to them.

• An “American African” is a migrant from Africa, whereas an “African American” is described in the source as a former slave.

• In the mid-nineteenth century, more than 2 million Irish people left Ireland because of the potato famine and went to English-speaking countries, including Britain, the United States, Canada, and Australia.

• Migration caused cultural shock, especially when people had not chosen to migrate but were compelled by economic, political, or religious difficulties.

📌 Internal migration can make people feel like migrants or strangers without requiring them to leave their country.

Further detail

• Emma Lazarus wrote “The New Colossus” in 1883, when religious persecution drove many Jews from Europe.

• Emma Lazarus advocated for Jewish refugees and used “The New Colossus” to express her activism.

📌 The Statue of Liberty and the Colossus of Rhodes both stand in a harbor and hold a torch, while the Statue of Liberty is also compared to a lighthouse called “a beacon-hand.”

• In “The New Colossus,” the Statue of Liberty is a guide welcoming refugees and a maternal “Mother of Exiles,” but this welcome remains symbolic because the “huddled masses” who crossed the seas “tempest-tost” were not always accepted.

• “America” contrasts expectations of buying on credit, owning a washing machine, having ample space, getting things for free, and benefiting from an industrial boom with being charged twice, twelve people sharing one room, and facing prejudice over one’s accent.

• Migrants in “America” had to cope with prejudice, rejection, and poverty.

• In Martin Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, two gangs fight to decide who will be the master, newcomers are rejected and must fight for acceptance, and earlier arrivals are considered superior.

• In Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America, two boys of Italian origin in New York become rich members of the mob during Prohibition.

💡 Memory Hook

Famine, oppression, and economic hardship → migration, culture shock, or exclusion.

📖 18. Methods for Analysing Documents

★ Must-know

• During the Blitz bombings of London, many children were separated from their families and sent to the countryside, and the government needed volunteers to care for them during the journey.

• The Australian government pursued a policy of forcibly integrating Aboriginal people into White society and classified them according to the proportion of White ancestry attributed to them.

• The listed classifications are:

  • half-caste: one-half coloured ancestry
  • quadroon: one-quarter coloured ancestry
  • octoroon: one-eighth coloured ancestry
  • third cross: a third generation descended from coloured ancestors

• The film’s language presents Aboriginal people as having no choice through passive constructions such as “must be helped,” “have been gathered up and brought,” and “cannot be left,” while also revealing White beliefs in the superiority of their culture and race.

• 🔄 A pictorial analysis proceeds through: describing colours, objects, time, and space, analysing how objects are arranged, interpreting the painter’s viewpoint and position

📌 Pictorial interpretation explains the work’s meaning and symbols in their political, economic, and social context, considers the artist’s other works and phases, and uses confident language only when the artist’s position is explicit; otherwise, it should express interpretations as possibilities.

• Political-speech analysis contextualises the occasion, time, and place; situates the speaker politically; examines persuasive argument and literary techniques; and analyses delivery, including gestures, tone, and pauses.

• A political speech is both a written and an oral document, and its persuasive aim is to gain the audience’s support.

• Video-documentary analysis briefly presents the title, author, production or broadcast context, summary, duration, director, editing, sound, music, graphics, and voice-over; then describes and analyses its sequences and creative choices.

• Autobiographical-extract analysis examines the text and reading pact, subject and recurring themes, the passage’s place in the work and historical time, significant settings, the narrator’s tone, intended reader impact, and writing choices such as temporal references, flashbacks, foreshadowing, lexical fields, and figures of speech.

Further detail

• The poster highlights:

  • a far-away place
  • being watched
  • not being alone
  • following the track

• In 1939, the Civil Defense issued the poster Women Wanted for Evacuation Service.

• The rejection lexicon includes:

  • unwanted
  • not accepted
  • bred out
  • stamp out

• The source presents White racial superiority as deeply rooted in society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when territories had been conquered and people were considered left to educate.

📌 Organise a pictorial-analysis essay by themes rather than dividing it mechanically into description, analysis, and interpretation sections.

• The introduction presents: the work’s title, author, creation date, medium, format, support, and exhibition location, the artist’s life, artistic choices, and relevant works, the work’s social, political, and economic context and subject, the artistic movement, the guiding problem

💡 Memory Hook

Describe, analyse, interpret; then organise evidence around a problem.

📊 Synthesis Tables

Graffiti and street art

Three School Films