1. Planning the Dystopian essay
Tuesday, 27 November 2018

2. Be aware of the rubric and AOs
No AO2
Be aware of the rubric and AOs

3. ‘Your’ texts The essay will be centred around 1984 and The Road.
Ensure you are clear as to the key sub-genre elements of these texts:
Political Dystopia and Eco-Dystopia… what do we expect as part of these genres?
What narrative elements do they have in common/divide them?
(narrative voice? Use of tense? Settings? Other stylistic elements?)

4. Your wider reading As a basic list you will have read:
Never Let Me Go, We, Drowned World, Brave New World, Handmaid, Children of Men, Fahrenheit 451, Orange and Survivor.
You should have read more widely still and explored the early dystopian science fiction of writers like H.G. Wells.

5. Chart the differences and similarities between all your texts using a SCASI framework.
Setting
Character
Action
Style
Ideas
Other comment
The Road
Post apocalyptic USA
The Man/The Boy as focus…
Travel to West coast. Hardship and terror
Terse, minimalist, brutal, figurative
Redemption, inhumanity We
Future world based on Bolshevik USSR
Scientist, anonymous
diary
Etc….

6. The question. Dystopia Section
You must answer Question 5 – the unseen
And one of the three options in Question 6
1984
(Handmaid)
General Dystopia
2 hours 30 minutes for 2 questions, each marked put of 30… 75 minutes each… at least 15 minutes of planning is sensible….

7. 2017
R:\My Departments\English\TEACHING OCR A level\H QP Jun17_AC - Copyright amended.pdf
The question paper 2017

8. Let’s plan the 1984 question.
Use the AOs to focus your planning: Context is the driving AO for this question AO3.

9. … Driven by the voice of protest?
Firstly, try and find some which aren’t, or at least in which the protest is not necessarily the driving element. You will need your contextual knowledge to try to be precise about the issues of the time of composition.
Is protest the same as warning?
‘There were many excellent answers to this question, usually starting from the premise that the writers of their chosen texts (often the two core texts, Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Handmaid’s Tale) were inspired by contemporary events and situations to produce their dystopian works. Knowledge of context was often excellent, and at its best where closely tied to the texts and to literary issues.’ Examiner’s Report OCR 2017.