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

Thank you for the reminder and yes @pipersing that really did disturb me too ...

The Collector // John Fowles

English lit mid 90s

Canterbury tales
the metaphysical poets
the go between
Macbeth
Sylvia Plath
The handmaids tale
Bonjour Tristesse
Wuthering Heights
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Of Mice and Men
The Mayor of Casterbridge

Doesn’t look as though the texts for French A ’level changed very much…
I did L’Etranger by Camus, and La chateau de ma mere in 1983

For English we did Chaucer’s Prologue, and another (but don’t remember which) from Canterbury Tales, and also The Spire by William Golding and Shakespeare’s The Tempest (or maybe Winters Tale?).

Surprised that’s all I can remember.

WJEC 1981. I think I still have the papers if anyone is interested.

French
La Symphonie Pastorale - Gide
Les Femmes Savantes - Moliere
A novel about a cyclist who loses an arm in a factory accident (anybody recognise this?).
Lovely poetry anthology with Hugo, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Rimbaud and Leconte de Lisle.

English
The Tempest, Anthony and Cleopatra
The Prologue and the Nun’s Priest’s Tale from Chauce
Paradise Lost
Emma - Jane Austen
Dr Faustus - Marlowe
Metaphysical Poets
Wordsworth and Keats.
Nothing from the 20th century. At all.

French included:
Thérèse Desqueyroux
Becket (Jean Anhouil)
some Apollinaire poems crept in there

English Lit included:
Chaucer, The Prologue of the Canterbury Tales plus a couple of tales, although as a class we took a couple each in groups in a 'deep deconstruct' and notes from those went to everyone, which was perhaps the most helpful piece of work in school that ever occurred.
Catch-22
Death of a Salesman
Merchant of Venice

And Antigone by Anouilh, I really loved that.

English lit 1985 :
Classics:
the wife of bath's tale (middle English edition )- Chaucer
Anthony and Cleopatra and As you like it- Shakespear
Persuasion - Jane Austen
Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte

Moderns:
Heartbreak House - George Bernard Shaw
A portrait of the artist as a young man - James Joyce
A farewell to arms - Earnest Hemingway
The Less deceived - Philip Larkin

Fabulous memories of easier, carefree college days!

Bless your cotton socks MN you have ALL made my day!

Happy Bunny!

x

@MissAmbrosia, I did A level German in that very year and we did a book called Die Neuen Leiden des Jungen W set in East Germany in the 60s or 70s and two books by Heinrich Boll - Das Brot der Fruhen Jahren and Die Verlorene Ehre des Katharina Blums. I LOVED the Katharina Blum one but couldn't help wondering if there were any other German novelists...

Been musing on this further and thinking about my English GCSE as well, and I can't remember doing a Shakespeare comedy at all. But surely we must have? For GCSE all I remember doing is Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet.

English 1984 (date, not Orwell book!)

Julius Caesar
Winters Tale
Gerard Manley Hopkins poetry until we rebelled and changed to Edward Thomas
Return of the Native
Bleak House
Sergeant Musgrave's Dance (no clue what it was about)
Something by VS Naipaul (also no clue)

The other set I think did better stuff including Sons and Lovers and Chaucer.

1989

French
Le Grand Meaulnes
La Porte Etroite

English
Coriolanus
Mansfield Park
The Go Between
Much Ado About Nothing

That's all I remember

@MsAdaLovelace I found my book!!!! Out of interest (as I've just made a cup of tea before setting out to do something tricky IT wise), I found a similar thread on Digital Spy https://forums.digitalspy.com/discussion/1021343/a-level-french-and-german-set-texts/p2
My weird Brittany book was Un Recteur de L'Île de Sein (Terroir) Henri Queffélec
https://www.amazon.co.uk/recteur-l%C3%AEle-Sein-Henri-Queff%C3%A9lec/dp/2266286714

I was almost right; it was about a fisherman who takes it upon himself to become the island's vicar (because nobody else wants to go there). It's probably a good book if you don't need to analyse it to within an inch of its life.

In my day the oral was with an external examiner (had to talk about a topic and then answer qns) and the French Lit paper (think they might all have been 3 hours) was all in English.

English -
Troilus and Crisede by Chaucer
King Lear
Gerard Manley Hopkins and Robert Browning poems
Bleak House

French, the only one I can remember is L’Etranger by Camus

I didn't study French A level but The Winters Tale, Pride and Prejudice, Love poems and in particular Metaphysicals including John Donne, lots of other poets including Victor Hugo, Seamus Heany. Chauser, the Wife of Baths Tale and The Knights Tale and general prologue. I recall we all loved Chaucer so spend loads longer on it.

In ‘86 I started studying Alevel English and was totally bored by Wuthering Heights and Hamlet so dropped the subject.

I don’t entirely understand how, but for French A level we only studied French cinema. Early 90s.

My teachers thought literature was too difficult for us, but I found cinema immensely hard. We watched dozens of films and my wonderful mum would record films late at night on BBC2 which by some happy coincidence was playing all the Nouvelle Vague films in my lower sixth. And we would go to the local cinema when it occasionally released some new French oddity.

I absolutely loved it. Better than some crusty old book.

A few years later I decided to read Zola, and started with Germinal…. That was hard work. Would not recommend.

1978 Great Gatsby , Hard Times, possibly Hamlet and Keats

English Lit, early 90s

General Prologue & Pardoners Take
Othello, The Tempest
Duchess of Malfi
Byron's Don Juan
A Passage To India
Sons and Lovers
The Caretaker

There must have been some other poetry,. I think maybe Yeats, but hard to remember what was syllabus and what I was reading anyway back then. Caretaker might have been GCSE, come to think of it. DH Lawrence was so deeply in the canon then, but his reputation has fallen of a cliff (and rightly so), doubt he's anywhere near the syllabus now.

I studied A level French from 1998-2000 and we read Le Ble en Herbe by Collette and Un Sac de Billes by Joseph Joffo.

I did A level French and English in 1987. Did Hamlet/Henry V/Bleak House/Seamus Heaney and A Passage to India. French : I did Le Grand Meaulnes and a Moliere but can’t remember which one as I went on to do French Lit at uni so it all gets a bit merged!! Loved loved my A level English texts

French, early 90s. L'Etranger, O pays,Mon Beau Peuple, Viou and Moderato Cantabile.

English - Hamlet, Antony and Cleopatra, one of the Canterbury Tales, Howards End, Heart of the Matter, Pride and Prejudice

Oh and I did Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead for English too

A Level Literature

Emma
A Midsummer Night's Dream
Antony and Cleopatra
Cat's Eye
Dylan Thomas poems

I love Marcel Pagnol. I have read 4 of his books and seen the films. They are so atmospheric and evocative.

I took A level French in 1977 and had to read the following:
Le Pere Goriot – Balzac
Candid – Voltaire
Andromaque – Racine
Tartuffe - Moliere

Our evil French teacher decided that we should read a fifth book and added Le Noeud de Viperes by Mauriac. I hated it.

While I didn't love all of the books it did teach me an appreciation of French literature and I went on to read several other books by classical French authors.