What did you study for A Level FRENCH and ENGLISH LITERATURE?

[MsAdaLovelace]

Good Morning MN,

Following on from my thread yesterday re O and A Level Texts, Syllabus and Exam Papers ...

Do you remember what texts you studied for A Level FRENCH and ENGLISH LITERATURE as I cannot remember all of them!

I have nieces and nephews that need to know!

Especially, if you studied A Levels from '83 - 85 ...

Thank you MN.

x

🤣 I did mine in 1974 and we also did Lear and L'Etranger, amongst many others. You'd think the exam boards would have moved on in over 30 years.

Plus ça change, as they say across La Manche.

A Level French 1983:

Le Blé en Herbe
Un Recteur de l’Ile de Sein
La Guerre de Troie n’aura pas lieu
Grandeur Nature

It seemed a huge amount compared to DD2’s A levels - I think she had one book and a film.

Le Noeud de Vipères was also our portion in 1974.
Le Misanthrope aussi.

I also did S level French and read L’Etranger as background reading as my teacher considered it to be a harder text than the A level books.

For A levels we had to do 5 essays in 2 1/2 hours - four on the books we had read and one on a theme such as French politics, feminism etc.

Can’t remember what book I did for French, something fairly contemporary for the time. For English, We studied The Canterbury Tales, The Corridors of Power by CP Snow, something by Iris Murdoch, maybe a Shakespeare? I did Pride and Prejudice, and Romeo and Juliet for O Levels, also some Browning and Keats poetry. A Levels were 1978.
Also did Macbeth, King Lear , Murder in the Cathedral, WW1 poets, She Stoops to Conquer and some Dickens, can’t recall which exams those were for.

1980 AEB French A'Level:
Le Chateau de ma mere by Marcel Pagnol
Le Notaire du Havre by Georges Duhamel
Les Enfants Terribles by Jean Cocteau
The 4th one I thought was L'Etranger by Albert Camus but I think I read that off my own bat and that the 4th set book was called something like 'Bonjour Tristesse' but whenever I google for the plot it doesn't seem to be the same novel I thought I read. It was about a male child actor and the only quote I can recall from it was 'Maman, mon maquillage'. It would be great if anyone else remembered it.

85-87 Hamlet, Tess of the D'urbervilles, Metaphysical poets, Heart of Darkness, The Canterbury Tales.

I just looked up the text I remember doing for Scottish Higher French in 1989 - La Porte Etroite by Andre Gide. I remember being utterly bemused

by it and finding it really hard to finish despite it being a very slim volume. Looking at the wikipedia plot summary no bloody wonder! What in God’s name were the examiners thinking?!

(I was really good at French and wen on to study it for my degree but I’m amazed I got past that book! )

I also did Le Noeud de Vipères!

I love saying “Noeud”.

Isn’t that what people call Mumsnet?

English gcse / a levels (mixed up in my mind!!)
of mice and men
macbeth
hamlet
midsummer nights dream
Chaucer’s Canterbury tales: the knight’s and the reeve’s tales

LP Hartley The Go Between
Arthur Miller Death of a Salesman

85-86. We had L'etranger - Camus, Les Femmes Savantes - Moliere, Les Trois Contes - Flaubert and Le Grand Meaulnes - Alain-Fournier.

I didn't do English at A Level and can only remember that we had Henry IV, part 2 for O Level.

English texts were Richard II and Jude the Obscure. Can you remember which Shakespeare you did?

A Levels in 2000 - for English lit it was Anthony and Cleopatra and Hamlet, Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady (hated it - must try it again!) , Waiting for Godot (HATED it!), then we did four American books - Who’s afraid of Virginia Wolf, A Streetcar Named Desire, and I can’t remember the other two but enjoyed them. We may have done a Chaucer too but now I can’t remember if fhat was actually for GCSE, The Knight’s Tale. We also did a lot of poetry, TS Eliot and the Wasteland. And read other books like Great Gatsby fhat we’re not part of the exams.

I don’t remember many from GCSE but do remember DH Lawrence’s The Virgin and the Gypsy and detesting it!

wonder if anyone did similar texts to me around fhat time?

Oh yes, one of the other American texts was Death of a Salesman

Just remembered another - Wycherley’s The Country Wife! Where I first came across the term cuckold. We all liked the text, quite funny and bawdy!

A level English lit - Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida, Women in Love, Henderson the Rain King, Paradise Lost, Miller's Tale. This was in the late 70's!

Me too!

A bit earlier here (1979)
French - Le Grande Meulnes
Can't remember the others!
English - Hamlet, King Lear, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, The Great Gatsby, Paradise Lost, a D.H.Lawrence (can't remember which one)
We studied lots of literature so im not sure which were examined

It's funny that my kids who did the French bac have four hours to write one essay!

Oh but there are serious rules and methods like we were never taught at school.

I did my English Lit Level in 1998 and we studied The Color Purple, Pride and Prejudice, Remains of the Day… I want to say Of Mice and Men, but that might have been GCSE…

I also did French and German but cant remember any texts except maybe one about the Stasi for German.

Edit: Paradise Lost!

A Level English in 1985:
Poems by DH Lawrence
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Hamlet
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead
The Return of the Native
Wuthering Heights

I think that was all but bloody hell just realised it was over 40 years ago 😭

Noeud de Viperes. L’Etranger, some Molieres maybe La Malade Imaginaire, Le Grand Meaulnes

Hamlet. Wife of Bath, Coleridge, John Clare, Emma, Wutherkng Heights Henry V

1989 . English was fab, French was meh (except L’Etranger)

1983 AEB French here. Bonjour Tristesse reawakened one of my brain cells and I immediately thought “Ah, yes, Francçois Sagan!”. I don’t remember the book at all, so I think we must have seen the film.

Alongside studying books/plays we were also examined on two topics. In our case it was French cinema and Brittany (from a geographic/industrial/tourism perspective).

Back in those days, my school seemed to regard exams and the associated syllabus as a minor irritation so goodness knows what we were supposed to have studied.

That's very interesting as that sounds very similar to 1980. I definitely remember writing about Britanny being a topic. It was definitely 4 books to read. Perhaps cinema was a topic as well as I remember watching the film of Les Grand Meulnes during a lesson and the teacher I remember doing the lesson was one of my 2 A'Level French teachers.
AI told me that 'Maman, mon maquillage' does feature in the film of Bonjour Tristesse but it is nothing to do with a male child actor which is what I recall.
If only I hadn't thrown all my school notes away years ago in a house move.
Thinking about it, I may have a diary from that period (1978-1980) it will likely mention French A'Level topics lol....must go and check.