Elat 2010

It was okay, I think. Your guide was a big help. When I first read through the paper I thought "Oh, damn, I can't connect any of these", but I remembered what you mentioned about noting anything interesting and I noticed that a couple of the bullet points I'd made on two of the passages sort of "went together", so I just went with them and it sort of worked. I'm a bit worried that I didn't concentrate on distinctive features of structure, language and style, as they ask you too, but I guess that overall it went better than I expected.

How did it go for everyone? I hope the issues that some of you were worried about (like structure, or restricting yourself to just prose or just poetry) weren't major on the day.

I honestly feel as though it went as well as it could have done, which is a good thing since it means I can put it out of my mind knowing that I couldn't have done better. In retrospect, I'm not sure if doing three texts was the best idea, but I prefer to group things thematically and they (a, c, e) all seemed to work well together. It also let me do two poems and one prose, which was what I had planned to look for if possible.

Apart from making a ridiculously wild statement about a possible meaning for a line in a poem (I knew as soon as I'd written it that it was wrong because of what I know about the poet, even though it seemed to make sense if taken straight from the poem itself), I'm happy with it.

Pfft, you want to hear about inappropriate statements? I basically called Wordsworth an enormous racist and implied that Auden thought of himself as god

I invented this girl that Auden wanted to marry and then an imaginary father figure standing in the way of his relationship. And then remembered that he's gay

The person who 'speaks' in a poem and the person who wrote the poem are not the same.

Ha, that's a good 'un. Trying to think how you got that from the poem though?

Yes. God forbid that an English student not know such a very basic aspect of poetry, right? We may just be having a teensy bit of jollity, however

i felt awful after the paper, basically took me two hours to get into school because of the bloody london tube strike and got there two mins before the thing even started!! *STRESS* but i felt like i really went off on a tangent about the 'human condition' and how language and the way we speak is a curse that has made us lonely individuals, FML. can't remember what the pieces were called but i think one was 'Their Lonely Betters' and the other was an extract from a book about a snooty woman and how she thought language was overwhelming and too much and her daughter annoyed her cause she couldnt speak yet. so yeea my essay was a joke. brought in some technical stuff and showed close reading of the texts etc, but was it enough? who knows.

but wtf was the play extract??? was not expecting thatt.

I did (a) and (c) too, like everyone else. They were both about language as a divide that separates man from nature, so they were fairly easy to compare. I think that the play was supposed to be humorous, and drew attention to how nonsensical commonly-used idioms are, but I gave it a wide berth since it would be hard to compare to any of the other extracts.