COMPULSORY TASK:

Please complete the assignment in the compulsory summer task document below. Click here to access the Text 2 NEA Notes template.

You will need to submit and discuss your notes with your English teacher in September. 

Year 13 English Literature Compulsory Summer Task

If you have any questions, please email l.clark@springwoodhighschool.co.uk

OPTIONAL EXTENSION:

Read the following essays from ‘The Art of Fiction’ by David Lodge (click here), and write a half a page summary of the main points of the essay. All of these essays are useful for your wider reading around the novels you are studying for the A-level course.

• Beginning (Jane Austen/Ford Madox Ford) page 3
• Suspense (Thomas Hardy) page 13
• Point of View (Henry James) page 25
• Interior Monologue (James Joyce) page 46
• Imagining the Future (George Orwell) page 134
• Symbolism (D. H. Lawrence) page 138
• The Unreliable Narrator (Kazuo Ishiguro) page 154
• The Uncanny (Edgar Allan Poe) page 211

'The Art of Fiction' is a collection of essays that, essentially, explains how novels work by focusing on different writing techniques.

Each topic is illustrated by a short passage or two taken from classic and modern fiction, ranging from Laurence Sterne to J.D. Salinger, from Jane Austen to Fay Weldon, from Charles Dickens to Martin Amis. David Lodge takes these passages apart and puts them back together again with the expertise of a novelist, critic, and teacher. Technical terms are lucidly explained, and their applications examined, in the literary-critical equivalent of slow-motion replays of some of the best writing in the English language. To throw further light on a given topic, the author sometimes refers directly, and revealingly, to his own experience of writing fiction.

This book is essential reading for students of literature, aspiring writers, and anyone who enjoys literary fiction and would like to better understand how it works.