Scotland - Advanced Higher English - book choices advice please.

[StayingDavidTennantsGirl]

Ds1 has just started his final year of secondary school in Scotland, and is taking advanced Higher English. He's told me that he has to choose two books for a piece of extended written work (he said dissertation), and I would like to pick the brains of Scottish mumsnetters and teachers about the choice of books for this.

Are there any books or topics that get done to death, and will make the examiner yawn when they see them again? And does the book have to have literary merit (dh and I assume it does - ds1 is considering The Satanic Verses, but dh, who has read part of it, thinks it is poorly written). Can you choose a modern book or books?

Discussing this with dh last night, he came up with one suggestion - The Historian by Victoria Kostova, and Bram Stoker's Dracula - we wondered if it would be interesting to compare and contrast the treatments of the Dracula story, and vampire stories in general.

However, dh and I know very little about the Scottish system, and what is actually required in this piece of work, and are worried about steering ds1 the wrong way - so I'd like to ask if any of you have any suggestions that a teenage boy would find interesting. And should we steer clear of the standard texts that often get used in exams - I was thinking Dickens, Austin and Bronte (and To Kill A Mockingbird, because I did that for O level and it ruined it for me).

Thanks in advance.

[Bink]

Oh, and I did it on those books because they were on my grandparents' bookshelves (along with MR James' Tales of an Antiquary shiver) and I used to just love them - not because they were on a list or suggested by anyone. I dug them out myself.

What has ds1 dug out for himself, like that?

[TeamDamon]

I don't teach in Scotland and don't want to offer bad advice therefore, but I am an English teacher and in the course I teach, students have to write a 3,000 word essay comparing three texts. We have found dystopian fiction works very well. You might also want to look at novels which have a distinctive narrative style - Martin Amis' Time's Arrow is fascinating in that sense - or, say, Remains of the Day with the central concept of the unreliable narrator.

[celticlassie]

I am not familiar with The Historian so couldn't say. I know that Muriel Spark is quite popular round our way and have also been aware of Confessions of a Justified Sinner a couple of times which pairs up well with the Testament of Gideon Mack. Have seen one on the use of the Unreliable Narrator in Lolita and the Talented Mr Ripley. There's been a bit of James Kelman too, Tolstoy Anna Karenina, EM Forster, Kazuo Ishiguro ...

Definitely not A Thousand Splendid Suns - I loved it but it's definitely not Advanced Higher Material. Stay away from Sylvia Plath too (although being male I'm sure he will) Will be back with a more comprehensive list. (If I remember when I'm at work ...)

[celticlassie]

From the gurus in my dept: To be avoided: Sylvia Plath; Margaret Atwood; Catcher in the Rye; One Flew over the Cuckoo?s Nest; The Wasp Factory; Jane Austen and 19th Century heroines in general; Carol Anne Duffy.

Some authors that tend to be done well include Evelyn Waugh; Ernest Hemingway; RL Stevenson; Albert Camus; TS Eliot; John Fowles; Alexandr Solzhenitsyn

Some tasks over the years:

The influence of Raymond Chandler on contemporary crime fiction.

Recreations of Childhood: ?Angela?s Ashes? by Frank McCourt; Paddy Clark ha ha ha by Roddy Doyle; Frank O?Connor- a selection.

The use of narrative in the works of Martin Amis. Analysis of techniques by used to create narrative ?voices?, and an evaluation of the effect, and effectiveness, of these: ?Dark Secrets?; ?Money?; ?London Fields"

Depictions of life in autocratic societies. A comparative analysis of themes and techniques used by three writers living in and writing about absolutist states: ?Shanghai Baby? by Wei Hui ( China ); ?The Unbearable Lightness of Being? by Milan Kundera ( Czechoslovakia ); ?The First Circle? by Alexander Solzhenitsyn (USSR).

An examination of the thematic and symbolic significance of Dopplegangers in literature: James Hogg: ?The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner?; Dostoevsky: ?The Double?; Stevenson: ?Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde?.


HTH!

[TeamDamon]

That use of narrative question re. Amis' works would be fascinating if one of the works was Time's Arrow. The novel is told in reverse. Interestingly, Time's Arrow was Amis' original considered title for London Fields so the dissertation could start from that point.

[stressedHEmum]

DS1 did his diss on attitudes to race and their portrayal in literature (can't remember the actual title). He used Heart of Darkness, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe and To Kill a Mocking bird, with supporting stuff from other novels.

The 2 other kids in his year did Tess (Hardy) and something to do with Jane Austen. These ones were popular when I did my CSYS English almost 30 years ago and are a bit done to death.

I did my dissertation on the changing attitudes to war as depicted through poetry from antiquity to the Vietnam War. (I was a fairly up myself pacifist )

Texts have to be fairly advanced and have a bit of depth to them. DS1's alternative would have been Dr. Faustus or Samuel Beckett and the theatre of the absurd, but both of those were set texts for his AH.

[StayingDavidTennantsGirl]

That helps hugely, celticlassie and everyone else - thanks for your help. I knew the collective wisdom of the mumsnet massive would come to my aid.

[WentworthMillerMad]

Harold Pinter - the caretaker

Compared / linked to restraint of beasts Magnus mills

DH teaches at outstanding Glasgow school!