Part 3

Part 3 focuses on how the context of production influences the content of works of literature, and how the context of reception influences how the reader interprets and/or appreciates the work. Three works of literature will be read for Part 3, one of which is a work in translation. The three works we will be reading are:

• The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien 
• Woman at Point Zero by Nawal Al Sadaawi 
• A View from a Bridge by Arthur Miller 

These three works will be the works that you write about on your Paper 2 in May (and on your SE Literature in March). One of them must also be used for your last written task.

The learning outcomes for this task are:

• Consider the changing historical, cultural and social contexts in which particular texts are written and received.
  Consider the context of production of the three works, all of which are fairly contemporary but also have large differences from our current word.  What aspects of the contexts are similar? What are different?  What is the effect of the similarities and differences to the way the text was received in the context in which it was written or the way it is received today -- or at any other time.
• Demonstrate how form, structure and style can not only be seen to influence meaning but can also be influenced by context.
  All three novels are fairly contemporary, compared to two of the works in Part 4, and make use of all the knowledge and ideas about writing common to modern novelists.  If the works had been written in a previous time, many features might not have been commonly used.  Technological developments such as the internet, television, film, telephony as well as developments in science and the social sciences (think of discoveries of how anthropology, sociology, psychology) all influence the way we look at the world and write about it. It is not just changes in language that distinguish the novels we read today from, say, Jane Austen or Charles Dickens.  Context thus does not only affect the content of a literary work, but also its form, structure and style. 
• Understand the attitudes and values expressed by literary texts and their impact on readers.
  Serious literary works always express the attitudes and values of the author -- and these are often either a reflection of the attitudes and values of his context, or a reaction to them (or both).  Understanding where the author is coming from helps us to not just understand the work he has produced, but also to understand our own reaction to it, as well as to reflect on our own attitudes and values,

The slides from the review are here.