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

French : Manon des Sources, L'étranger, and then Les 400 Coups, Jules et Jim, and A'Bout de Souffle, I think Pierrot le Fou too.

English: I know why the caged bird sings, Talking Heads, Hamlet, Frankenstein, The Franklin's Tale, Dubliners, Great Expectations, possibly Wuthering Heights (I may have imagined this!).

Now I'm wondering why I had to study Chaucer General Prologue, Wife of Baths Tale and the Knights Tale when others only seem to have studied one. Could it have been my teacher just loved Chauser? We also seemed to have studied lots of love poetry too Metaphysicals mostly Donne, but also Victor Hugo, Sylvia Plathe, Seamus Heany, Barrat-Browning plus lots of others too. To be fair our whole class got great grades on both Chauser and the poems probably because we did so damn much of it. I know with Chauser we got to choose which one to write on in exam whereas schools who only studied one had to write about that one. Our teacher told us that over and over, that we were lucky as got a choice in exam. We had about 8 hours homework every week in English literature and at least 2 essays each week. It was a far harder subject than most because of the work rate demand by our teacher.

French lieutenant's woman, John Donne, Hamlet
Balzac's Le Curé de Tours; Jean Anouilh, Becket
Women writers? Wash your mouth out!

83
Chaucer General Prologue
Chaucer Pardoner’s tale
Macbeth
The Tempest
Milton - Paradise Lost
Milton - Samson Agonists
Jane Austen - Pride and Prejudice
Charlotte Brontë - Wuthering Heights
Thomas Hardy - Mayor of Casterbridge
Poets:
Keats
Wordsworth

I took English A Level in 1985 so was your exact contemporary.

We studied 9 tests. The ones I can remember were

Othello
Julius Caesar
Anthony and Cleopatra
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Hardys poems
Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience

There must have been at least two more novels and possibly a 20th Century play, but my minds gone blank.

Edited to add:
I've remembered!
Chaucer - The Wife of Bath
Waiting for Godot

Definitely did another novel as well. That's now going to bug me

English 1988-1990

Chaucer - Canterbury Tales (Prologue and Pardoner’s Tale)
Shakespeare - Much Ado About Nothing
George Bernard Shaw - Saint Joan
Robert Browning - Men & Women
Jane Austen - Mansfield Park
Mary Shelley - Frankenstein
JG Farrell - The Seige of Krishnapur
Philip Larkin - Whitsun Weddings and High Windows

Loved it and went on to do degree then masters in Eng lit.

English, took in 1989 -
Chaucer, feel like all the Canterbury tales - I had 2 English teachers and 1, a man, used to love reading middle English.
Much Ado About Nothing
North and South Elizabeth Gaskell
Look Back in Anger
King Lear
Metaphysical poets

Ooh, me too. I remember doing Flaubert’s ‘Madam Bovary’ as well, and Moliere’s ‘Le Misanthrope’

For French and English Literature in 1985, the texts were:

French
L’etranger - Camus (absolutely hated this book)
La Malade Imaginaire - Molière
Le Bourjois Gentilhomme- Molière
Dinner at Antoine’s - forget the author but adored this play

English

Hamlet - all time favourite ever
Othello
Wuthering Heights - brilliant book
The Go Between - LP Hartley - a strangely compelling read, despite the association with the Yellow Pages ad at the time
Duchess of Malfi - loved this
The Wasteland - whatever was this poem about?
Canterbury Tales - yawn
William Blake - didn’t enjoy his poems either apart from Jerusalem
Dover Beach - Matthew Arnold - a recitation of this evocative and haunting poem would be one of my Desert Island Discs picks

Looking back, although at the time it felt like a slog and the endless analysis took much of the joy out of the books/poems, I can see that the A level syllabus, certainly for English, left me with an abiding love of good literature. Even now, occasionally, quotes from Hamlet and Dover Beach pop into my head.

I did from 1984 to 1986, A level French, Spanish and Italian.
I can only remember Boule De Suife et autres contes de la guerre, and that's because my teacher described her as a 'Tart with a Heart'.
I hated the literature side, loved the languages.
Got 3 Cs, so that sounds about right !

French I remember doing Les Mains Sales which I hated.

English we did Sons and Lovers, Othello, Emma and Jane Eyre. And Chaucer.

Same year. We also did Therese and L'etranger, plus a collective n of Maupassant short stories. Can't remember #4, but I think it might have been Sartre Huis Clos.

English Lit: King Lear, Lord of the Flies, Emma, Metaphysical Poets, The Crucible, Dubliners. I want to say Coriolanus too, but can't believe we did 3 plays.

Waters are muddied for me by the fact that I went on to do English at uni, and I can't remember what belonged there.

Anyone for Spanish? I remember only El Otro Arbol de Guernica, and En La Ardiente Oscuridad (more existentialism which made me happy).

Forgot Waiting for Godot. Let’s go…..

@dnac I too love Dover Beach. I sometimes think about having the bit that starts Ah love let us be true to one another tattooed on my wrist for easy reference

I'm trying to remember if I did Sons and Lovers as well. The trouble is I did S level English and we did loads of texts for that, but there werent any set texts, so I get muddled.

Did anyone else do the S level exam in English? There were only two questions on the paper and I can still remember one of them 50 years later!

French, 1989, Colette’s Le ble en herbe, Sartre’s Les mains sales, Voltaire’s Candide and Camus’s La peste. I still have my copies of three of them and read a bit of La peste during lockdown!

English: The (sodding) Tempest, King (bloody) Lear, Ted Hughes, Tender is the Night - Scott Fitzgerald, The Bostonians - Henry James. There may have been others, can't remember now.
Did that as an adult by correspondence course (pre internet - writing essays by hand and sending them to my tutor...)

ETA: how the heck did i forget Chaucer: The Miller's Prologue and Tale, and the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales.

French: Tartuffe, Mme Bovary - can't remember the others. Gave up after a year tho.

2nd Edit: French was for exam in 1982. English was for exam in ... 1992? 1993)

but i heard that language A-levels don't study full texts now?

I did it and got a distinction (still proud, lol). We were told the only texts were the King James Bible and Shakespeare which I duly read most of. Hard to imagine doing that now.

All I can remember about the exam is that I wrote some absolute cobblers about Troilus and Cressida.

I did S levels in English and History, during the last few years in the 90s when they were still set. I quite enjoyed them! I can’t remember what I wrote about in English. In History I remember writing an essay about the formation of nation states, something about law in Weimar Germany, and some kind of Collingwood-style essay on what is historiography. Got 1s for both subjects!

There were lots of questions on the paper. In the history paper there were three sections: one section on general history, one section with questions which asked you to go into further depth on one of your A-level topics, and one theory and method section. I don’t remember anything about the format of the English one, though!

@NormalAuntFanny congratulations. I got a Merit.

The question from the paper that I remember was

"I write, let the reader learn to read". Discuss this statement in relation to 20th Century literature.

I also presumably wrote a load of bollocks! I wouldn't have a clue where to start now!

@AnnaQuayInTheUk I got a C in my actual English A level so I have to take the good bits where I find them...

English A Levels - 1986/7 - Hamlet and Measure for Measure, T S Eliot The Waste Land, Burnt Norton and Ash Wednesday, Tess of the Durbervilles (🥱), Lark Rise, Look Back in Anger, Howard's End. Was that all? Think so.

Ah yeah of course The Canterbury Tales and The Miller's Tale in the original.

Loving all the updates.

So how many Female Writers did we all study (at school) ... not ENOUGH!

Jane AUSTEN
Anne BRONTE
Charlotte BRONTE
Emily BRONTE
Sidonie-Gabrielle COLETTE
Sylvia PLATH
Françoise SAGAN
Mary SHELLEY
Virginia WOOLF

...

Thankfully I did at University but that will be for the another thread ...

one of our O level set texts (Cambridge board, summer 1980) was Silas Marner. I flippin' LOVE that book.