1. PAPER TWO - LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE
How valid is literary fiction as a means of making social or political comment? In your answer, refer closely to two of the works you have studied.
PAPER TWO - LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

3. What are the key words or terms?
How valid is literary fiction as a means of making social or political comment? In your answer, refer closely to two of the works you have studied.
SOCIAL COMMENT: discussion of issue that exits within a community. It is an issue regarding the individual or group. As a comment it is meant to challenge current perspectives or reinforce current perspectives on an issue.
OR: select either social OR political
POLITICAL COMMENT: discussion about government control or government laws surrounding a particular community.
VALID: a good way; a logical or reasonable way…

4. What to put in your introduction.
How valid is literary fiction as a means of making social or political comment? In your answer, refer closely to two of the works you have studied.
Thesis - this is the question worded as a statement.
Title of the texts, authors and genre
Literary techniques employed by the authors to demonstrate thesis…. no more than three… e.g. SETTING, STRUCTURE, CHARACTER, NARRATIVE, IMAGERY

5. A note on literary features
STRUCTURE - Opening and closing of a text; climax; rising action; chronological; shifts in time, suspense, sentences, silences, gaps, punctuation, stage directions, references to props
these techniques will foreground dominant beliefs or ideas…. will support the bildungsroman … will create dramatic irony… will create sympathy with certain characters or ideas…

6. SETTING - atmosphere, mood, imagery, symbolism, juxtapose, metaphor
these techniques will support themes being explored… social or political commentary… act as a doppelgänger to the character… reveal aspects of character… support the atmosphere….

7. CHARACTER - symbolism, tone, privileged, first person, irony, gap, marginalised, reliability, omniscient, metaphor, doppelgänger, monologue, aside
remember all characters are symbolic of larger ideas being explored…. characters will used to position the reader

8. NARRATIVE - omniscient, first person, reliable, privilege, colloquial language, formal language, informal language, irony, dominant reading, silences, marginalises, dialogue, emotive, intertextual
the narrative will invite the reader to sympathise with a preferred point of view being explored

9. IMAGERY - atmosphere, symbolism, juxtaposition, metaphor, confined, open, doppelgänger, mood, tone
the imagery will highlight the dominant reading for the reader.

10. Context
The context of the novel or play is going to be very important to your essay…
No literary work is separate from the circumstances that surround it. The ideas or concerns that people share in a period or place are reflected in the choice of narrative, themes explored, the portrayal of characters, the language used, the imagery and the stylistic features used. There may also be an assumption of what is right or wrong because in their society it is so and they don’t address the moral view at all.

11. CONTEXT CONTIN.
Another way of showing how important context is for analysis and critical understanding is to think about how some works can be understood in a completely different way at different times. (Merchant of Venice - representation of African or Jewish people…)Literature often reflects huge shifts in thinking in society. What seems liberal or forward looking at the time of writing seems limited and ethnocentric at a later date.