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

Circa 1990 I did Sons and Lovers, Schindler’s Ark, The Winter’s Tale and Oranges are not the only fruit for Eng Lit. And although I failed French (shit teacher who hated me and the feeling was mutual 😂) I remember reading L’etranger by Camus which I loved and something called Boule de Suif which I remember being very painful to plough through!

It was a heck of a long time ago but Therese Desqueyroux for French( that's not how you spell it!) and I think some poetry Jacques Prévert.

For English....erm...Othello,Antony and Cleopatre as plays. Keats for poetry. And I simply cannot recall what novel!! That's going to annoy me. It was Lord of the Flies for O level.

Oh and just remembered we did Thomas Hardy poetry too. “And marching time drew on and wore me numb” For some reason that quote has stuck in my head for the last 30 odd years!

Mid-90s:

French
Bonjour Tristesse
Boule de Suif
Germinal
Can’t remember the last one but honestly the Zola was more than enough for several texts!

English
Midsummer Night’s Dream
Hamlet
Emma
Dr Faustus
Robert Browning
Andrew Marvell

It is all coming back to me and I am very grateful that I adored both my English and French A Level teachers ... we all did!

English Lit A level 1998 - Hamlet, Jane Eyre, The Remains of the Day, Waiting for Godot, the poetry of Elizabeth Jennings (who the hell chose that for teenagers??).#

French I can only remember Jean de Florette - I did English lit at uni with some French courses so I get a bit muddled with what I read when. It wasn't very literature-heavy though. We seemed to talk about nuclear power and the cuisine of Normandy a lot.

@AtomicBlondeRose

I am all for more cuisine from Normandy ...

All that butter!

Delish!

A Level French 1984: Duhamel's Le Notaire du Havre, Ionesco's La Cantatrice Chauve (couldn't make head or tail of it), Anouilh's Antigone, short stories by Zola, and there must have been another prose text, I think, but I can't remember what it was.

1986 Boule de Suif, Tartuffe, Terre Des Hommes.

Loved Tartuffe, there was an amazing hilarious English adaptation starring Alison Steadman and Martin Clunes.

A great teacher is a wonderful thing. My English teacher was amazing. Cemented my love of literature. French? Not so much… 😂

It is on YouTube @Frillybelt in several parts ...

There's a lot of Pagnol in the French memories- in 1992 we did La Chateau de Ma Mere! Also a short stories collection by Maupassant and Le Mariage de Figaro.

English was Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Anthony and Cleopatra, Yeats poetry and anything else I have forgotten.

Ooh - I knew that I'd forgotten one - Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller - bloody Willy Loman (? spelling) and Biff ... or Chip (maybe confusing that with DC primary reading...😁

Do love a bit of Bonjour Tristesse with Jean Seberg :

]

Late 90s here:

Cyrano de Bergerac
La Clé Sur La Porte (Marie Cardinal)

And the new one that is out soon with CLAUS BANG and CHLOE SEVIGNY ...

I am loving going down this French / English Lit rabbit hole MN!

x

French A level in 1977. Thérèse Dequeyroux, Becket (Anouilh), Le Cid (Corneil), Madame Bovary (hated it!), Vipère au Poing. Didn't do English Lit for A level.

For English literature (1999) I studied Hamlet, Much Ado, Catcher in the Rye. I can’t remember what else. For French I don’t think there were set texts - more like topics. We did SIDA (AIDS), Tiers-Monde, 1968. For my oral presentations I chose to talk about Le Marais (resistance fighters) and the author Colette.

Everyone else I knew seemed to be doing Molière: Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme!

I had forgotten about French literature. Although I have a vague memory of falling asleep to La Haine. We studied L’etranger and La Gloire de mon Pere, I think. Not the most enjoyable or memorable bit of my studies

we had to do a 12-15 minute conversation in our specialist subject - i did French government and politics, including the intricacies of the proportional representation system (also did A Level Politics). And an essay on the power of medieval French kings which went very nicely with my History A Level.

This was all for 1999. 26 years later my reading French is still ok but spoken is abysmal. But i was pleasantly pleased that Duolingo put me at B2 level, although rhe vocab includes loads of words that weren’t a thing last century😱

English Lit - Hamlet, Measure for Measure, Emma, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, poetry of William Blake, Look Back In Anger...hmm, probably some others.

French - Boule de Suif by Guy de Maupassant, La Guerre de Troie N'Aura Pas Lieu by ...omg I can't remember...and Les Petits Enfants du Siecle by...again, I forget. 1987.

Recent compared to others here (2009) but for English Literature I studied The Great Gatsby and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead.

How could I forget Tess of the D'Urbervilles?! My best ever essay 😂.

Oh, yes to Rosencrantz & Guildenstern too.

I took mine in 1990.
French texts were L'avare by Moliere and La porte etroite by Andre Gide.
English were Coriolanus and Much ado about nothing, Mansfield Park, I Claudius and Chaucer (can't remember which tales specifically). I think that was it!