How many themes should you learn per lit text gcse?

Many websites have different themes for the same text and there are many so should you learn them all or just 4 main ones? What if one you don't know comes up?

Reply 1

{Moss}

Original post by ebony_7

Many websites have different themes for the same text and there are many so should you learn them all or just 4 main ones? What if one you don't know comes up?

Yeah generally you learn the main themes, e.g. for An Inspector Calls if you do that, get about five quotes for Gender, Class, Young Vs Old, Community etc.
The best method is that when making a quote bank for your characters, you pick quotes that can be applied across a wide range of themes too.

For example, if you have Macbeth - when revising Lady Macbeth, a good quote is 'come you spirits, that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here'. That can be used just for Lady Macbeth, but it could also be used in gender (subverting Jacobean beliefs about women) or the supernatural.

'look like the innocent flower but be the serpent under it' is again a good quote for Lady Macbeth, showing her power with the forceful verbs, but could be used in gender for that same reason or appearance Vs reality.

So you can see how one quote can be applied across a range - while it's a good idea to revise key quotes for key themes, you can save yourself a lot of trouble by choosing quotes that cover many themes or characters. It's generally easy to see which quotes are like this.

I hope that helps! Best of luck with your exams :biggrin:

Reply 2

beefreya

all of them! I know it seems daunting, but a lot of the stuff is transferable across themes, like for old texts stuff from religion can transfer over to stuff on love/marriage.

In general there are more than just 4 themes, i did inspector calls at GCSE, and here are the themes i can recall... Class, Capitalism vs socialism, gender, marriage, setting (setting questions are always stupid, but they do come up,)Power, age, social responibility etc.... but find about 20 really good quotes that are very transferable and just learn them. unfortunatley at gcse there is really no way of getting around learning quotes.

My tip is, make a template for a paragraph, and then just slot in the stuff relating to whatever the theme is. If you are really struggling, then if you look at past papers, you can see what themes they havent done yet, those are more likely to come up (but others could still come up!)