Stuck at 25/30 Section A Paper 2 OCR Gothic Unseen
HOW DO I GET OUTTT!!!!
What's your feedback at the moment?
Zara Ahh! Yeah most of the AO3 you should be doing for Paper 2 should be around the genre, not what was happening at the time! It's a little different from paper 1 in that you should actually tie in the big message-based genre conventions into the actual topic sentences and thesis statement rather than leaving them to the why! So for example, for Gothic, you might notice that Gothic literature often concerns itself with the same major ideas:
- The monstrosity of seemingly ordinary people.
- The allure of isolation and the difficulty of integrating into society.
- The slow decay of society, represented by the degradation of once-impressive structures associated with some past glory (especially for the Southern Gothic)
Things like that! Then, you'll want to ask yourself whether or not your extract fits those things and why. Like the writer had a choice to write in that genre, right? So why did they choose it? And they probably aren't following every convention at every time, so why did they chose those particular conventions when they did?
Heyy :) thought I'd add some things I’ve picked up from class too! depending on the wave/era of Gothic the unseen extract is from, there’ll be certain tropes and conventions that were prominent at the time. For example, Victorian Gothic often shifts from castles to urban settings, reflecting anxieties linked to industrialisation and crowded cities. As Shani said, I think the importance is less the historical context itself and more how that context influenced Gothic conventions, eg fears surrounding anonymity, invasion of the domestic sphere, or the unknown hidden within modern society. There are also broader Gothic tropes that appear across different periods - heightened emotion, otherness, the uncanny etc - but some conventions are much more tied to particular Gothic movements, so this is where extra context regarding 'waves' or 'era' could be brought in. I’ve always been told to keep context concise and focus more on what the Gothic genre was exploring at the time, and how the extract reflects or challenges those tropes - then tying this into the extract specific analysis of literary devices/form/structure and all that jazz. Hope that makes sense :) (disclaimer; this is just what my teacher has told me, don't know if this differs per teacher!)