Planning the Dystopian

essay
5/12/21
Be aware of the rubric and AOs
No AO2
‘Your’ texts

• The essay will be centred around 1984 and The Road.

• Ensure you are clear as to the key sub-genre elements of these texts:
• Political Dystopia and Eco-Dystopia… what do we expect as part of these genres?
• What narrative elements do they have in common/divide them?
• (narrative voice? Use of tense? Settings? Other stylistic elements?)
Your wider reading

• As a basic list you will have read:

• Never Let Me Go, We, Drowned World, Brave New World, Handmaid, Children of Men,
Fahrenheit 451, Orange and Survivor.

• You should have read more widely still and explored the early dystopian science fiction
of writers like H.G. Wells.
Chart the differences and similarities between all your
texts using a SCASI framework.
Text Setting Character Action Style Ideas Other
comment
The Road Post The Travel to Terse, Redemption,
apocalyptic Man/The West coast. minimalist, inhumanity
USA Boy as Hardship brutal,
focus… and terror figurative
We Future world Scientist, diary
based on anonymous
Bolshevik
USSR
Etc….
The question. Dystopia Section

• You must answer Question 5 – the unseen

• And one of the three options in Question 6
• 1984
• (Handmaid)
• General Dystopia
• 2 hours 30 minutes for 2 questions, each marked put of 30… 75 minutes each… at least
15 minutes of planning is sensible….
2017

• R:\My Departments\English\TEACHING OCR A level\H472-02 QP Jun17_AC - Copyrig

ht amended.pdf
• The question paper 2017
Let’s plan the 1984 question.

• Use the AOs to focus your planning: Context is the driving AO for this question AO3.
… Driven by the voice of protest?

• Firstly, try and find some which aren’t, or at least in which the protest is not necessarily the driving element.
You will need your contextual knowledge to try to be precise about the issues of the time of composition.

• Is protest the same as warning?

• ‘There were many excellent answers to this question, usually starting from the premise that the writers of
their chosen texts (often the two core texts, Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Handmaid’s Tale) were inspired
by contemporary events and situations to produce their dystopian works. Knowledge of context was often
excellent, and at its best where closely tied to the texts and to literary issues.’ Examiner’s Report OCR 2017.