The IMPOSSIBLE task

Hi. I'm really happy that you found your way here. If you're studying for exams, I really hope that this site will help you. If you aren't studying for exams, I hope you find it interesting and enjoyable. I set this site up because it became clear to me that we ask our GCSE (and often A-level) students to do the impossible: write literary criticism without ever having read it. We train you from primary school to write stories by reading you stories. But we don't read you literary criticism. I don't suppose that the average year two class would particularly enjoy my essay on Blood Brothers, but I hope you might find it (and all of my other essays) useful.

But first a few dos and don'ts.

This is mentioned elsewhere on the site, but you MUST NOT reproduce parts or all of my essays in your exams. These essays are here to give you some idea of what literary criticism can be like, but you will have your own ideas and ways of expressing them. That is what makes writing about literature interesting and is one of the reasons that I love to do it!

I intentionally don't stick with the PEEL or PETAL or PQC structures that are taught in school because I find them restrictive and stifling. However, you will find that in all of the paragraphs that I write, I discuss quotations from the text, I explore the contexts in terms of my analysis of the text, I often talk about techniques and I maintain an academic style. This is what the exam boards want from you, none of them actually stipulate that you have to write in any particular structure, BUT those structures can be very helpful to make sure that you have covered all of the assessment objectives that they are looking for.

Literary criticism is a varied and creative activity. There are as many different ways to write about, Macbeth, say, as there are academics and students who are writing about it. I recently went to a lecture about Frankenstein where the lecturer discussed the many ways that novel has been interpreted over time: as about fear of medical science; fear of electricity; fear of nuclear power; fear of genetic engineering and fear of robotics! So, my interpretations are not definitive, you may not agree with how I see Lady Macbeth, or Pip or Sheila Birling, but that's fine. By working out your own interpretations, your own literary criticism will get more interesting and developed and hopefully get you higher marks.