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

Harper, I was sufficiently keen to google the play: Jean Giradeau.

It was apparently translated to English by Christopher Fry “Tiger at the Gates”.

I’m annoyed that I can’t remember my odd Breton book.

School was so different in the ‘80’s. I vividly remember having an argument with my French aural examiner about whether women should study economics at Uni (my plan). At the end of the exam, the guy handed me his car keys and asked me if I minded going to his car to get him his cigarettes!!

A level English Literature was:
Shakespeare- Hamlet, Othello
Marlowe- Dr Faustus
Wordsworth- The Prelude
Dickens- Bleak House
Lawrence- The Rainbow

1980 A level English Lit. I can remember:

Macbeth
Henry IV Part II
Mill on the Floss
Great Gatsby
Dubliners
Tess of the d’Urbervilles
Gerard Manley Hopkins
Wuthering Heights
Secret Agent

French - 1987
Le Blé en Herbe - Colette
Les Mains Sales - Sartre
Mme Bovary - Flaubert
Manon Lescaut - Prevost

I did German too but my brain seems to have blocked out the horror of the books,

90-92. King Lear, Mrs Dalloway, The Power & the Glory, Wuthering Heights, Much ado about nothing

Late 90s

French - Le chateau de ma mere (I dropped to AS so only read this one book!)

English Lit
Shakespeare - The Tempest
Chaucer - The Wife of Bath
Christina Rossetti - Collected poems
GB Shaw - Major Barbara

I'm sure I did another play...also did Doll's House but think that was only for Theatre (also did Mother ~Courage and her Children, Brecht).

Ishiguro - The Remains of the Day
JP Hartley - The Go Between
Austen - Persuasion
Hardy - The Mayor of Casterbridge
Collins - The Woman in White (my favourite of the bunch)

There was one more novel as I know we did 6.

A levels 1980-1982
French: Short Stories by Guy de Maupassant,
Le Grand Meaulnes by Alain Fournier and Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert.

English: Antony and Cleopatra and The Winter’s Tale
The Way Of The World by William Congreve
Keats, selected poems

c. 1991 Eng Lit. The end of the affair (Graham Greene), Pardoners tale (Chaucer) I cant remember what else. Didnt do very well despite my love of literature and an A at GCSE. I blame Chaucer.

Oh and Moliere’s Le Malade Imaginaire.

Yes Madame Bovary! That was my last text I couldn’t remember earlier!

And Persuasion by Jane Austen!

1981..
Emma
Where Angels Fear To Tread
King Lear
Coriolanus
Edward Thomas poems.

These are coming back to me in dribs and drabs , also studied A View From The Bridge and All My Sons by Arthur Miller.

I was slightly later. I took my A levels in 1990. I think I did English Lang and Lit, so fewer set texts. I remember: The Bell (Murdoch), Wife of Bath, French Lieutenant's Woman (Fowles), A WInters Tale, Schindler's List, A Passage to India (Forster). I really enjoyed Fowles and Forster particularly and went on to real more. Murdoch too, to some extent. I also remember studying a fair bit of Sylvia Plath's poetry.

English lit... Blake's songs of innocence and experience
Macbeth
Can't remember the rest !

WTA ... !!!

What a CF indeed!

I do hope you did ECONOMICS at University too @Madcats ...

I was definitely lucky with my A Level teachers!

Oh I remember studying Sons and Lovers too (along with Schindler and The Winters Tale). But I thought it was GCSE. Not sure now!

English Lit exam texts late 90s: Othello, Richard II, The Rivals, Canterbury Tales, The Handmaid’s Tale, Seamus Heaney for poetry. Think we also did Emma, Room with a View, The Great Gatsby and some poetry by Yeats for coursework but I can’t remember completely.

French: Les petits infants du siècle. Great book and you've just prompted me to re-read it.
English: Translations - Brian Friel / Winters Tale and Death of a Salesman
The Bell - Iris murdoch/ The Color Purple
The Wife of Bath
Can't remember any others...
This was 1988

*enfants

Ok remembering more ...

PYGMALION // G B SHAW

You are all jogging those little cells MN!

Sorry, this was actually 1990 when I took the exams

I remember French better than English )did both at A level) back in the Dark Ages (1985)

Quinze Contes by Guy de Maupassant
La Bête Humaine by Zola
Becket by Jean Anouilh
La Princesse de Clèves by Madame de la Fayetteville

God it was a hard slog and I read them all in English.

English in 83:
Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare
Paradise Lost (can't remember which part), Milton
The Wife of Bath's tale, Chaucer
Our Mutual Friend, Dickens
Poems of Auden
The Royal Hunt of the Sun, Shaffer
The Power and the Glory, Greene

Oh I forgot Far from the Madding Crowd as well. Looking back, God it was a vigorous curriculum.