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INTERVIEWS & ADMISSIONSSubject Knowledge Audit – English

NAME / DATE

Purpose of the Audit

Your indications of subject knowledge strengths and weaknesses will be used as a basis for discussion during your individual interview and will inform target-setting afterwards. When the course begins, the audit will also be used to inform planning for the development of key areas of individual trainee subject knowledge.

In addition to completing the audit below you should choose two of the attached passages (one poem and one prose passage) and be ready to discuss points of comparison. In the course of the interview you will be asked to read one of the passages aloud.

1. English Literature (ie literature written in English, not necessarily in Britain).

Please identify the authors/texts with which you are most familiar, whether through formal study or personal reading.

Poetry before 1900
Poetry since1900
Drama before 1900
Drama since1900
Prose before 1900
Prose since1900
Please list any novels you have read which are aimed more specifically at the 11-16 age range – contemporary fiction for teens

2. English Language and Media

Which aspects of these subjects have you studied?

Media
English language: history, structure and usage

Choose one of texts A and B, and one of texts C and D. You will be asked to read aloud from one or more of the texts which you have chosen, and you will be invited to discuss and compare them.

TEXT A. Stealing by Carol Ann Duffy

The most unusual thing I ever stole? A snowman.
Midnight. He looked magnificent; a tall, white mute
beneath the winter moon. I wanted him, a mate
with a mind as cold as the slice of ice
within my own brain. I started with the head.
Better off dead than giving in, not taking
what you want. He weighed a ton; his torso,
frozen stiff, hugged to my chest, a fierce chill
piercing my gut. Part of the thrill was knowing
that children would cry in the morning. Life's tough.
Sometimes I steal things I don't need. I joy-ride cars
to nowhere, break into houses just to have a look.
I'm a mucky ghost, leave a mess, maybe pinch a camera.
I watch my gloved hand twisting the doorknob.
A stranger's bedroom. Mirrors. I sigh like this - Aah.
It took some time. Reassembled in the yard,
he didn't look the same. I took a run
and booted him. Again. Again. My breath ripped out
in rags. It seems daft now. Then I was standing
alone among lumps of snow, sick of the world.
Boredom. Mostly I'm so bored I could eat myself.
One time, I stole a guitar and thought I might
learn to play. I nicked a bust of Shakespeare once,
flogged it, but the snowman was the strangest.
You don't understand a word I'm saying, do you?

TEXT B. THEME FOR ENGLISH B by Langston Hughes (1951)

The instructor said,
Go home and write
a page tonight.
And let that page come out of you---
Then, it will be true.
I wonder if it's that simple?
I am twenty-two, colored, born in Winston-Salem.
I went to school there, then Durham, then here
to this college on the hill above Harlem.
I am the only colored student in my class.
The steps from the hill lead down into Harlem
through a park, then I cross St. Nicholas,
Eighth Avenue, Seventh, and I come to the Y,
the Harlem Branch Y, where I take the elevator
up to my room, sit down, and write this page:
It's not easy to know what is true for you or me
at twenty-two, my age. But I guess I'm what
I feel and see and hear, Harlem, I hear you:
hear you, hear me---we two---you, me, talk on this page.
(I hear New York too.) Me---who?
Well, I like to eat, sleep, drink, and be in love.
I like to work, read, learn, and understand life.
I like a pipe for a Christmas present,
or records---Bessie, bop, or Bach.
I guess being colored doesn't make me NOT like
the same things other folks like who are other races.
So will my page be colored that I write?
Being me, it will not be white.
But it will be
a part of you, instructor.
You are white---
yet a part of me, as I am a part of you.
That's American.
Sometimes perhaps you don't want to be a part of me.
Nor do I often want to be a part of you.
But we are, that's true!
As I learn from you,
I guess you learn from me---
although you're older---and white---
and somewhat more free.
This is my page for English B.

TEXT C: Eliot from The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism

We must not confuse the intensity of the poetic experience in adolescence with the intense experience of poetry. At this period, the poem, or the poetry of a single poet, invades the youthful consciousness and assumes complete possession for a time. We do not really see it as something with an existence outside ourselves; much as in our youthful experiences of love, we do not so much see the person as infer the existence of some outside object which sets in motion these new and delightful feelings in which we are absorbed. The frequent result is an outburst of scribbling which we may call imitation, so long as we are aware of the meaning of the word 'imitation' which we employ. It is not deliberate choice of a poet to mimic, but writing under a kind of daemonic possession by one poet.
The mature stage of enjoyment of poetry comes when we cease to identify ourselves with the poet we happen to be reading; when our critical faculties remain awake; when we are aware of what one poet can be expected to give and what he cannot. The poem has its own existence, apart from us; it was there before us and will endure after us. It is only at this stage that the reader is prepared to distinguish between degrees of greatness in poetry; before that stage he can only be expected to distinguish between the genuine and the sham–the capacity to make this latter distinction must always be practised first. The poets we frequent in adolescence will not be arranged in any objective order of eminence, but by the personal accidents which put them into relation with us; and this is right. I doubt whether it is possible to explain to school children or even undergraduates the differences of degree among poets, and I doubt whether it is wise to try; they have not yet had enough experience of life for these matters to have much meaning. The perception of why Shakespeare, or Dante, or Sophocles holds the place he has is something which comes only very slowly in the course of living. And the deliberate attempt to grapple with poetry which is not naturally congenial, and some of which never will be, should be a very mature activity indeed; an activity which well repays the effort, but which cannot be recommended to young people without grave danger of deadening their sensibility to poetry and confounding the genuine development of taste with the sham acquisition of it.

TEXT D. Cameron from Feminism and LinguisticTheory

The question of language and its political implications has exercised writers, philosophers and social theorists throughout the intellectual history of western civilisation. It is noticeable, too, that the subject has inspired extreme pessimism; from ancient Greece to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four, speech and writing have been credited with a malign power to regulate human social relations in ways we are not aware of and to disguise important truths in a cloud of misleading rhetoric. Today’s speakers inherit the idea that language is a weapon, used by the powerful to oppress and silence their subordinates; nor is this belief unjustified. But why should language, and knowledge about language, be a resource for the powerful alone? Why shouldn’t this weapon be appropriated by the other side?

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