As you embark on this course and have compiled a Book List, it is crucial to establish foundational knowledge and skills for a successful journey. Each time you study a work, you should reflect on key aspects such as stylistic analysis, concepts, and Global Issues. Additionally, various approaches to studying literature, as outlined below, will transform the way you read a text. Ensure that your reflections in these areas are documented in your Learner Portfolio, which will record your approaches to studying a work and serve as a central element of your course.
Learner Portfolio entries serve as cumulative preparation for the three assessments: Paper 1, Paper 2 and the individual oral. However, it is about more than assessment. Your interpretations of each of the nine works on your Book List will build on a tradition of other, preceding interpretations. Recall, from your TOK class, the relationship between personal and shared knowledge. Your Learner Portfolio entries overlap both of these areas. They also help you to appreciate the impact of a writer’s creative approach on their audience and how this compares to writers in other literary traditions. You will be able to explore these critical, creative, and comparative approaches directly in your Learner Portfolio entries.
For each of the nine works, you need to include at least one response using each of these approaches in your Learner Portfolio
A critical approach to literary study entails using the skills of analysis such as literary terminology, close reading of writer’s choices, knowledge of literary form conventions and awareness of the writer’s and readers’ contexts to construct an individual interpretation of the work. Your Learner Portfolio allows you to develop each of these skills—both in isolation and gradually in combination with each other.
This might take the form of three paragraphs in which you analyse Mercutio’s soliloquy from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet translated into your language A language. You could explore how the macabre imagery in Mercutio’s speech is the culmination of the preceding chaos of the battle between the Capulets and Montagues and also foreshadows his own death. How does the content and structure of Mercutio’s soliloquy make this character stand out among the others in the play?
You will also use the Learner Portfolio to explore the works using a creative approach by using and developing your imagination. When reading a work, you are not only a reader but also a writer. By putting yourself in the position of a writer, you can start exploring different tools that a writer needs to use, such as techniques, language, form, or tone, to create a piece of work. This helps develop your skills as a critical reader. You can live in the imaginative world of the characters, situations, and contexts and then weave those together to create something beautiful and build your own world.
Imagine yourself being Juliet, from Romeo and Juliet by Shakespeare, then re-create a page from Juliet’s diary. What would Juliet write after meeting Romeo for the first time? You can write a few diary entries to express Juliet’s thoughts and feelings. Another idea might be to write a biography of Romeo and Juliet that may include how old they were, their hometown, how and where they met, what happened between them, their deaths, or the results of their deaths. Imagine what life was like for a 14-year-old daughter living in a wealthy family in Verona during the Renaissance. How would this knowledge help you to enhance your understanding of the play as a whole? By being creative, you will gain knowledge, understand different literary forms, and know how to use techniques and language better to approach your assessment components later.
A comparative approach to the reading of a work involves establishing connections between works and becoming aware of their similarities and differences. A good starting point when you approach a work this way is to try to ask yourself how it relates to other works you have read before. No work is written in a vacuum; every writer is aware of a tradition that precedes them and of the fact that a new work will establish some kind of relation to it. This tradition expresses itself not only in universal themes that literature addresses repeatedly but also in the way and form in which they address them. A text may relate to another because of a similar subject matter they explore, but it also relates to all other texts that were written in the same literary form. It could be asked how far a text has adhered to or departed from its corresponding conventions.
Your task as a reader is to try to discover the nature of the relationship between this text and the literature that was written before and after it. This relationship could be one of continuity, tension, or questioning. The relationship could be implicit or explicit. For example, if you were reading Romeo and Juliet, you could explore how the play relates to previous or later literary explorations of other “star-crossed lovers”. You could ask how this play interacts with other tragedies by Shakespeare or by other writers. You could compare and contrast film versions by director Franco Zeffirelli, from 1968, and director Baz Luhrmann, from 1996. You could examine how the song composed by the band Radiohead for Luhrmann’s film, “Exit music (for a film)” interacts with Shakespeare’s play. The tasks chronicled in your Learner Portfolio could range from a Venn diagram establishing similarities and differences between the play and the two films to the creation of a song that could have been included in the film adaptation of the play.