Some final points on our texts

Hi Y10

Right, a few things in this post then.  Some general advice, comparative points, a little bit on tragedy and an example.

The most common errors:

Be specific about the emotion (love and hate are both emotions).

Err. Hello? Mary Shelley... Shakespeare. If you write about the characters, you write as if they are real and this limits your analysis. Author's names should be littered throughout your essay.

Upgrade your topic sentences.

Focus on the quotation. (Groan!) Pick and word out and analyse it.  (10% of your GCSE is this alone.)

Link your context to the quotation precisely.

Don’t say very. It’s the ‘nice’ of analysis.

Romantics. Romanticism. Capital letter please (otherwise, you’re talking more red roses and candlight!)

Sweeping statements. Much better to say: I could be seen. This suggests. This connotes.

If one more person writes constantly, I might just give it all up...

Comparative elements

•       Pathetic Fallacy

•       Settings

•       The Gothic

•       Voices – Soliloquy and Narrative voice

•       Imagery

•       Tragic structure

•       Recurring Motifs

•       Religious beliefs/Christianity/ Biblical language/Paradise Lost

•       Hallucinations

•       Character physical reactions and manifestations of fear

•       Supernatural

•       Consequences of actions

•       ‘Vaulting ambition’

•       Rhetoric ( Rhetorical questions, balanced phrases that becomes fragmented)

•       Natural world/ order

•       Babies, innocence , new born, corrupted by man

Tragedy

A tragedy is a drama or literary work in which the main character is brought to ruin or suffers extreme sorrow, especially as a consequence of a tragic flaw, moral weakness, or inability to cope with unfavourable circumstances (from dictionary.com). You can see how we can apply this to our texts.

A classic tragedy (Aristotle’s Poetics) has a number of common features.

Firstly, you have a hero. Their status is established as high (been better to see higher status fall from Ancient Greece to Closer magazine...) Don’t get confused with hero – it doesn’t mean good. This character has hubris; essentially, they are arrogant. They also have a fatal flaw that leads to their downfall; this is called hamartia. They realise this flaw has caused great suffering, anagnorisis, but it’s too late as death is inevitable. Often this is the turning point, peripetia, that leads the play to its tragic denouement, but not always so. Through this, pity and fear are provoked in the audience until we come to the catharsis where we are purified by the play that we have seen. We leave better people!

There are some other points, like the three unities and a cart to wheel dead bodies off, but this is the basic structure. A (usually noble) hero is arrogant and has some flaw that makes them do something awful. This causes their downfall and they realise this too late and die probably with other people.

You should be able to see how you can relate this to the texts. Is Frankenstein a tragic novel? It’s a good point of comparison, but very much an extension and not something you need to worry about.

Example paragraph.

Shakespeare uses classical references to show the intensity of Macbeth’s remorse and this illustrates his desire to be King as damaging from the start. As soon as Macbeth has murdered Duncan, Shakespeare shows his language is regretful: ‘Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood Clean from my hand?’ The immediacy of Macbeth’s guilt and regret is made apparent with a direct link to the metaphor of having blood on your hands. This metaphor is repeated throughout the play as Lady Macbeth sees an immovable ‘spot’ on her hand and, when Macbeth’s downfall  is imminent later in the play, McDuff says that ‘[Macbeth’s] secret murders [are]sticking on his hands’. Here, Shakespeare shows the tragic outcome as inevitable because Macbeth will not be able to wash his hands clean and he seems to know that this will end in his own death. Furthermore, the classical reference to ‘Neptune’ conveys a sense of prayer to the language and the rhetorical question accentuates the intensity of his fear.  It also gives a hyperbolic exclamation of Macbeth’s remorse as the water will literally be able to wash his hands. As Neptune is the God of the sea, known to the Jacobean audience, not the Christian god the audience would have also viewed this with suspicion as it was an intensely religious time; Shakespeare uses this reference to show how Macbeth has also gone against the Christian god by going against the Divine Right of Kings and this places him alongside the evil witches. His appeal to ‘Neptune’ shows how far ‘Brave Macbeth’ has fallen; Shakespeare shows how this outrageous sin will ‘stick’ as such a blasphemous act can only result in a gruesome demise and the character dramatically shows confusion and horror at this prospect.

As ever, let me know if you need anything.

Ms