AS ENGLISH LITERATURE EXAM SECTION A -

CONTEXTUAL LINKING

In this pack, you will find a series of non- fiction extracts for extra
revision practice. Yay! Apply the question below to any one of the
extracts A to E. You can print them off so that you can annotate them.
During half term, you could email your answers to your English
teacher: Mrs Sims or Miss Abel and we’ll get them back as soon as we
can.

You should spend one hour on the contextual linking question for Section A.
Timing for this question:
10 - 15 minutes: reading, annotating, planning,
20 - 25 minutes: on each bullet point.
HOWEVER more confident students might decide to integrate their responses in
which the extract and the wider reading comparisons are interwoven throughout
the answer. You choice.

The good thing is that the actual question will always be EXACTLY the same.
Of course the non-fiction extract will change each time.

The Question:
• How does the writer present his thoughts and
feelings about the struggle for identity?
(20 - 25 minutes)

• How far is the extract similar to and different

from your wider reading about the struggle for
identity in modern literature? You should consider
the writer's choices of form, structure and language.
(20 - 25 minutes)
Total (45
marks)

In this question you must refer to your wider reading across all THREE genres (prose,
poetry and drama)

How many wider reading texts should you refer to?

The exam board say between 3 - 6 texts is plenty! (Not so bad eh?) This is so that you
do a little more than name drop and really consider your choices.

Remember all the texts you have studied for coursework count as wider reading. You
may also use Duffy, but I strongly advise you to use other poets as well.
Extract A – a diary

Bobby Sands, elected Independent MP for counties Fermanagh and

South Tyrone, was a member of the IRA and went to prison in 1977
for an unproven link to a gun found near the scene of an explosion.
He was part of the 1980-81 hunger strike by Republican Irish
prisoners in the H-blocks of Long Kesh prison outside Belfast.

The strike was called to force the British government of the time to
remove the criminal prisoner status and grant political prisoner status
to Irish Republicans, imprisoned as part of the war between Northern
Ireland and Britain. This included the political prisoner’s right to wear
his or her own clothes instead of prison uniform. They did not achieve
their goals and 10 men died. One of them was Bobby Sands. On 5
May 1981, aged 27, he died, after 66 days of refusing food and
medical intervention.

In 1982, an anthology of his writings, Skylark Sing Your Lonely Song,

was published. It comprises diary entries, memoirs, poetry and short
stories. It was written during his sentence on sheets of toilet paper
with ballpoint pen refills, and subsequently smuggled out over a
period of time.

The following extract is part of his diary and is taken from where he is
reflecting on his situation as a prisoner.

A stretch of tarmac surrounded by barbed wire and

steel is the only view from my cell window, I’m told
it’s an exercise yard. I wouldn’t know. In my
fourteen months in H-Block, I haven’t been allowed
to walk in the fresh air. I am on ‘cellular
confinement’ today. That is the three days out of
every fourteen when my only possessions, three
blankets and a mattress, are removed, leaving a
blanket and a chamber pot.

I’m left to pass the day like this, from 7.30 a.m. to
8.30 p.m. How I spend my day is determined by
the weather. If it’s reasonably warm, it’s possible
to sit on the floor, stare at the white walls, and pass
a few hours day dreaming. But otherwise I must
spend my day continuously pacing the cell to
prevent the cold chilling through to my bones.
Even after my bedding is returned at 8.30 p.m.
hours will pass before the circulation returns to my
feet and legs.
Methods of passing the time are few and far
between, so I am left with many hours of
contemplation: good times, bad times, how I got
here, but, most importantly, why I am here. During
moments of weakness I try to convince myself that
a prison uniform and conforming wouldn’t be that
bad. But the will to resist burns too strong within.

To accept the status of criminal would be to

degrade myself and to admit that the cause that I
believe in and cherish is wrong. When thinking of
the men and women who sacrificed life itself, my
suffering seems insignificant. There have been
many attempts to break my will but each one has
made me even more determined. I know my place
is here with my comrades.
Extract B – a biography

Radclyffe Hall’s publishers and novel, The Well of Loneliness, a story

of lesbian life and love set in her own society, were put on trial and
banned under Parliament’s ‘Obscene Publications Act’ in 1928, an act
of literary censorship. The author of Hall’s biography, Diana Souhami,
claims that far from being a racy read, ‘the sexiest line in it [Hall’s
novel] is “and that night they were not divided”’. Souhami takes the
modern view that it was not the book or even a notion of sexual
obscenity that was on trial, but the lifestyle and sexuality of its
author.

This extract covers an episode in Radclyffe Hall’s life which occurred

in 1920, when she was 36. St John Lane Fox-Pitt and Sir Ernest
Troubridge, whose wife had left him for Hall, had publicly declared her
a ‘grossly immoral woman’. It is from here in the biography that the
extract has been taken.

Radclyffe Hall was summoned and told of Fox-Pitt’s

words. They were catalytic. Here, demeaned, was
her life. She acted with a forcefulness thought to
be the prerogative of admirals and lords. She
demanded that he withdraw his accusations. He
refused. Like others after him, he underestimated
her. She said her honour and Mabel Batten’s were
impugned and she gave the eighteenth-century
equivalent of a challenge to a duel. She saw her
solicitor, Sir George Lewis, and took out a slander
action.

Fox-Pitt and Troubridge went into a tizz. Money

gave Radclyffe Hall power to use the law and they
knew it. She challenged them to make their
accusations public and to justify their prejudice.
She had no fear of the court’s judgement or
publicity from such a case. Had the price been
crucifixion or public pillory she would have paid it.
She was not going to be embarrassed into silence.
She was a homophobe’s nightmare: dykish, rich,
unyielding, outspoken, successful with women and
caring not at all for the small vanities of men.
Mabel Batten* would have been placatory,
smoothed feathers and soothed tempers. Radclyffe
Hall wanted justice, honour and scruple to resound.

* a lover of Radclyffe Hall’s

Extract C – a political travelogue

The political travelogue differs from other travelogues in that the

writer attempts to grasp and present to the reader the political
situation and its effect on the people in the region travelled. The
focus is a commentary on current affairs rather than simply a
guidebook to the area for holiday or leisure travel.

Adhaf Soueif is an Egyptian journalist and commentator living in

London. This extract is taken from Mezzaterra, an anthology of her
essays between 1981 and 2004, and is entitled ‘Under the Gun: A
Palestinian Journey.’ Soueif has travelled to Palestine and is trying to
gain access to the old part of the city of Al-Khalil (or Hebron), which is
road-blocked and besieged by the Israeli army, to write an article for
the Guardian newspaper.

The photographers tell me that when there is going

to be any real action the soldiers simply shoo away
the observers. A mobile rings and it is my guide
begging me to come back.

I want to go into the old city but my guide and

driver are fearful and reluctant. As we argue in the
street a woman stops and asks where I’m from. I’m
an Egyptian from London writing a piece for a
British paper. ‘Then you should take her in,’ she
says, and starts to describe a route.

They will not listen to her. An imposing man in a

grey cashmere overcoat appears. They seem awed
by him. I later learn that he is a Palestinian
journalist who’s been shot in five separate
incidents. *The woman tells him what’s happening
and he says, ‘Come on, chaps. It’s your duty to
take her in. You’ve got Israeli licence plates. She’s
got a British passport. Take her in.’

Reluctantly they make a detour and try to drive into

the old city. Forty thousand people live here under
curfew. Twelve thousand children cannot go to
school. Fifteen mosques are closed. In the centre,
armed, live what Israel says are 400 settlers** and
the Palestinians say are 100. All this is for their
benefit.
‘If the army were to go away’, I ask, ‘and the
settlers were content to live here among you, would
you let them?’

‘They wouldn’t. They would go away.’

‘But if they wanted to stay, could they?’

‘They’ve taken people’s homes. If you could go

into the centre you would see families camped by
their homes, refusing to leave, and the settlers
throw rubbish on them and beat them up. They’re
not even proper settlers; they are religious
students, mostly from the United States,
volunteering to come for one or two years to do
their religious duty by being here-’

* This was Mazin Da’na who worked for Reuters.

He was killed by the Americans in 2003 while
filming in Baghdad.

** The settlers here are Israeli citizens who live in

Palestinian settlements, or visitors/guests of Israel who
temporarily moved into Palestinian areas.
Extract D – a cultural commentary

This extract comes from The Female Eunuch by the writer,

broadcaster and academic Germain Greer. It was originally published
in 1970, but has since been reprinted several times. This edition is
from 2006 and includes the author’s ‘Foreword to the 21st
Anniversary Edition’, which was originally printed in the 1991 edition.

The Foreword is Greer’s updated commentary on the subject of the

text – the social position of women – as she sees it 20 years after she
first wrote the book. This extract comes from that Foreword.

The freedom I pleaded for twenty years ago was

freedom to be a person, with the dignity, integrity,
nobility, passion, pride that constitute personhood.
Freedom to run, shout, to talk loudly and sit with
your knees apart. Freedom to know and love the
earth and all that swims, lies and crawls upon it.
Freedom to learn and freedom to teach. Freedom
from fear, freedom from hunger, freedom of speech
and freedom of belief. Most of the women in the
world are still afraid, still hungry, still mute and
loaded by religion with all kinds of fetters, masked,
muzzled, mutilated and beaten. The Female
Eunuch does not deal with poor women (for when I
wrote it I did not know them) but with the women of
the rich world, whose oppression is seen by poor
women as freedom.

The sudden death of communism in 1989-90

catapulted poor women in the world over into
consumer society, where there is no protection for
mothers, for the aged, for the disabled, no
commitment to health care or education or raising
the standards of living for the whole population. In
those two years millions of women saw the bottom
fall out of their world; though they lost their child
support, their pensions, their hospital benefits, their
day care, their protected jobs, and the very schools
and hospitals where they worked closed down,
there was no outcry. They had freedom to speak
but no voice. They had freedom to buy essential
services with money they did not have, freedom to
indulge in the oldest form of private enterprise,
prostitution, prostitution of body, mind and soul to
consumerism, or else freedom to starve, freedom to
beg.
Extract E – an autobiography

This extract is taken from I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the first
volume of autobiography from the African American writer Maya
Angelou. It was first published by Virago in 1969, but recalls
Angelou’s childhood during the 1930s-1940s, beginning with her
depiction of life in the segregated southern state of Arizona.

When I was three and Bailey four, we had arrived

in the musty little town, wearing tags on our wrists
which instructed – ‘To Whom It May Concern’ – that
we were Marguerite and Bailey Johnson Jr., from
Long Beach, California, en route to Stamps,
Arkansas, c/o Mrs. Annie Henderson.

Our parents had decided to put an end to their

calamitous marriage, and Father shipped us home
to his mother. A porter had been charged with our
welfare – he got off the train the next day in
Arizona – and our tickets were pinned to my
brother’s inside coat pocket.

I don’t remember much of the trip, but after we

reached the segregated southern part of the
journey, things must have looked up. Negro
passengers, who always travelled with loaded lunch
boxes felt sorry for ‘the poor little motherless
darlings’ and plied us with cold fried chicken and
potato salad.

Years later I discovered that the United States had

been crossed thousands of times by frightened
Black children travelling alone to their newly
affluent parents in Northern cities, or back to
grandmothers in Southern towns when the urban
North reneged on its economic promises.