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.

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Wait, so current A level kids don’t have to read a single book, just a chapter or two? And there I was thinking that Camus was a bit of a slacker book/quick read.

I wasn’t a natural linguist but, armed with 401 French verbs, I could probably have crafted some respectable answers/sentences to incorporate into just about any current question if I just had 1,000 words to analyse.

That’s before being able to read the books in translation.

even though i gave it up, i still read l'Etranger, and then i read La Peste because i quite liked the Camu and being able to understand it.

Am currently reviving my french on Duolingo, so may see if i still have them. i have a Maigrait novel too (but that's a parallel text with German so - meh)

Le Bourgeois gentilhomme, Le Nœud de vipères, Un coeur simple 1980

Emma, Tess of the D’Urbevilles, Hamlet, the Franklin’s Tale and The Less Deceived 1980

They do a lot more culture and politics than was the case in the old A level, plus special projects (Breton language in DS's case but could have been anything). Really, only one exam out of the three they do is about literature (and that's half literature, half film).

Oh I’d forgotten Paradise Lost!

@Madcats oh no they still have to read a full book! Just the one though. We do Eduqas and the set text list is:
l’Étranger - Camus
No et Moi - de Vigan (female!)
Antigone - Anouilh
Le Silence de la Mer - Vercors
Boule de Suif - Maupassant
Une année chez Les Français - Laroui

They can either study 2 books or 1 book 1 film. We teach La Haine like all the other schools in the country

I also run an extra-curricular French lit club at school. Some pupils do actually attend voluntarily! This term we did Le Petit Prince for a bit of existentialist doom light relief

French

La Peste by Camus
La Porte Etroite by Gide
Le Barbier de Seville by Beaumarchais
Moderato Cantabile by Marguerite Duras
Les Femmes Savantes by Moliere

English

Othello
The Knight’s Tale by Chaucer
Martin Chuzzlewit by Dickens - although I never even read it, as I can’t stand Dickens
Tamburlaine The Great by Christopher Marlow
Poems of the 60s, including Dylan Thomas (maybe that was O level?)
Paradise Lost by Milton
The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy
Nostromo - Joseph Conrad
A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh

Couldn’t avoid the Brontẽs. Went to their former school.

@FarmWifeLife Le Petit Prince is one of my favourites. There's a wistfulness to it. I'm still partial to a bit of Le Petit Nicholas though, but I guess that's not really A level material. 😁

I did a French exchange when I was 15 and the family gave me some Le Petit Nicholas books to read when I was staying with them.

1982 Joint Matriculation Board

English Lit
Anthony &Cleopatra
The Winters Tale
Persuasion
Dombey & Son - loved that one
A House for Mr Biswas - VS Naipaul - wonderful!
The Franklin’s Tale
5 Long heavy poems - Elegy in a Country Church Yard, some Keats and can’t remember the rest but all v desolate

French
Malade Imaginaire
Le Grand Meaulnes
Madame Bovary

Loved English Lit.

I did Drama, as well.

1985
Therese Desqueyroux

some weird novel about a German soldier - might have been called Hans? In French- he got his hand blown off

Little Dorrit
Tennyson
King Lear
Troilus and Cressida
Coriolanus
Metaphysical poets
Chaucer- the knights tale

Therese Desqueyroux

i think that was the one that made me jack in the french! i had totally forgotton it.

ARGHHH. Now i have a tic and will be dreaming about our Dragon Lady French Teacher

@FarmWifeLife Le silence de la mer does begin to awaken a few brain cells (but I can’t honestly remember whether we had to read the book for A level or I simply watched a film with DH a decade or 2 later).

We had cheese, wine(!) and film mid-afternoons at my comprehensive school in an unremarkable bit of Sussex in the ‘80’s (we did seem to have a lot of eccentric “taught in the Commonwealth” teachers who possibly mistook our school for the boarding school down the road in those pre-internet days).

Have had a blast reading all your posts MNs.

Thank You. Thank You.

My reading and re-reading list has just exploded.

Happy reading MNs.

x

Hello MN!

Do join in with this new thread, if it should take your French Fancy!

Just for FUN!

What did you study ... BA (Hons) Modern Languages :: FRENCH | Mumsnet

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Oooh good thread! 1994 A leveller here - French we did Tartuffe by Moliere (hated it) and Un Sac De Billes by Joseph Joffo (liked this much more). English - we did Paradise Lost (1 and 2 I think?), Wuthering Heights, The Wife of Bath's Tale by Chaucer, Midddlemarch by George Eliot. I think it might have been Twelfth Night for Shakespeare. I get a tad muddled because my friend and I did additional texts for Oxbridge prep.

I recognise a lot of the previous suggestions.

Canadian so we did a lot of Canadian texts: Gabrielle Roy Bonheur d'occasion, and Michel Tremblay Les Belles Soeurs. But one of the favourites of the angsty teens was Rimbaud's Une saison en enfer
For English there were a lot of similar texts but likewise included Canadian classics from Margaret Lawrence and Margaret Atwood.

I love that you are still on this thread fabulous MNs!

I will get back to the Modern Languages thread at some point soon ... I deleted it as I had to focus on something else and did not want to leave it unanswered and I know how that is not appreciated on MN!

Right, I am off to look at some A' Level English and French Papers!

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OMG just remembered - Twelfth Night was GCSE - it was King Lear! We saw Robert Stephens playing Lear at the RSC!

I was very fortunate that my English teachers for both O'Level and A'Level took us ALL the time to the theatre to see EVERYTHING!

I am so grateful to them and my A'Level French teacher too ... he would get French magazines, books, DVDs ... anything I asked for ... my favourite was the subscription to TIME OUT PARIS - PARIS PASSION!

What legends!

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