OCR A-Level English Literature: the Component 02 topic areas (prose themes and genre) overview quiz quiz

Three topics, study two

Five topics, study one

One topic, no choice

Ten topics, study three

They do not connect the two written sections in any meaningful or assessable way, so each is prepared entirely separately

Only Section A draws on a topic's conventions, while Section B is concerned purely with biographical detail about each author

Section A analyses an unseen extract from the topic, and Section B compares set texts through those conventions and contexts

Conventions belong only to the non-examined coursework component and never feature in the written examination at all

Describing in vivid detail how physically frightening and grotesque the creature is to the reader

Counting how many times the monster appears and tracking the precise chapters in which it returns

Comparing the monster to villains and creatures found in modern horror films and franchises

Decoding it as encoding a cultural fear of its period, through context

To warn: it exaggerates the dangerous tendencies of the writer's own society

To entertain readers with strange imagined worlds that have no bearing on the writer's own time

To predict the future accurately and forecast the precise events that will later unfold in reality

To describe technology and celebrate the scientific progress that such future societies tend to enjoy

It is not important, since the events of the plot reveal everything a reader needs to know about gender

Whether a woman speaks for herself or is spoken for shapes her agency

Narration is only relevant to poetry and verse forms, never to the prose set texts on this topic

Only the plot matters, because the choice of narrator has no effect on how a woman is represented

How many named women appear in the text and how their total number compares with the men

Whether the author was a woman, since only female writers can depict women's constraint truthfully

Whether the text naturalises the constraint or exposes it as injustice

How long the text is, because longer works necessarily explore constraint in far greater depth

It has no prescribed set texts, so candidates simply choose any American novel that they happen to enjoy

Context is not assessed at all in this topic, so historical knowledge offers candidates no advantage whatever

It draws on only one short text, which makes detailed historical command unnecessary for strong answers

Its literature is saturated with the specific history of the period, so historical command is decisive

Whom the promise includes and excludes, grounded in the period's realities

Whether it is realistic, judging the Dream solely against whether such success is plausible today

Whether the story has a happy ending in which the central character finally achieves wealth and status

How rich the characters are, measuring their success purely by the money and possessions they accumulate

It is not necessary, since a general account of leaving one country for another captures the experience well enough

The experience is always particular, so AO3 rewards the specific history and politics of the migration depicted

All migrations are essentially the same, so the particular country, period and host society make no real difference

Only the character's private feelings matter, and the surrounding historical and political context can be set aside

A type of plant bred from two species, a meaning the term keeps when it is borrowed into literary criticism

A grammatical term for a sentence that mixes two tenses together, often used to describe the supposedly confused style of a migrant narrator

The idea that migrant identity is a new, mixed selfhood, not just a division; reading doubleness as resource as well as wound

A kind of setting that combines two contrasting places, such as a homeland and a host city, within one scene

Describing the surface of the text in ever greater detail without moving beyond what is literally there

Memorising more quotations and reproducing as many of them as possible regardless of their relevance

Writing longer answers, on the assumption that sheer length is what distinguishes the strongest essays

Reading the surface through context, so it becomes more than literal