How depressing are your A1 texts?

[Ruan Chun Xian]

I once talked to Lc about this. Yesterday I was just having a conversation with one of my classmate about a lit course she's doing and we got around to talk about our A1 books, which is one depressing list. I challenge you to find an A1 text list more laden with pessimism, death, doom and gloom than mine.

Part I:

Sophocles: Oedipus Rex - you can't get much more depressing than this tragedy, unless you're doing Antigone.

Camus: The Outsider - for a while it got me thinking in a very existentialistic way, which, someone like me, is really scary.

Buchner: Woyzeck - it's about jealous rages and murder.

Part II:

Conrad: Heart of Darknes - a bundle of joy, that one.

Blake: Songs of Innocence and Experience - even Songs of Innocence talked about some gloomy issues, like child labour and the general state of life in London at the time. Definitely not fluffy little love poems.

Shakespeare: Macbeth - another tragedy

Luther King: Collection of Speeches - we never actually got around to doing these but given the context that these speeches were made in, they can't be too happy either.

Part III:

Miller: Death of a Salesman - the title says it all. Death.

Strindberg: Miss Julie - she breaks up her engagement, has sex with a servant, realises that she's just fallen from her high status then kills herself. Delightful.

Shakespeare: Othello - more tragedy

Stoppard: The Real Inspector Hound - ok here's the black sheep. This is about the only thing that's remotely amusing and comedic in this whole list. Even then, it's black humour

Part IV:

Author that I can't remember the name of: Mother Courage and her children - they go through war, all die in the end and Mother Courage is left alone. Also about one of the most boring and draggy plays I've ever read.

Orwell: 1984

Huxley: Brave New World

Atwood: The Handmaid's Tale

All three above are classified as dystopian fiction. Talk about a new, degenerated world where things fall apart (haha no pun) and conditions for normal people are appalling. Sums up the mass of gloom, don't you think?

So, I wonder, can we really get a list of books for A1 that isn't so depressingly sad? Is this just my teacher's love of gloomy themes and subjects? Goodness know how I, who am quite optimistic and tend to look at the glass half full normally, managed to get through this list of books and not turn into a suicidal, existentialist pessimist.

[Bandev]

I am not sure if mine is as bad yours, but it is pretty bad too

Part 1

Hedda Gabler - she cause someones death and suicides... but it is an awesome play

Miss Julie - see HMS

Medea - kills the king, princess and most shocking her sons to get back at her husband, I quite like it aswell, it is so easy to read.

Part 2

Whitman's Leaves of Grass - This is very happy - although it has a slight existential twist. I quite like it too.

King Lear - Tragedy - only two main characters out of ten survive the play

Heart of Darkness - see HMS

Part 3

Gerrard Manley Hopkin's poetry - quite celebratory - but also tortured. I quite like it despite being an atheist, and Hopkins is alway talking about God.

R. S. Thomas Poetry - angry, frustrasted, meloncholic

Gwen Harwood's Poetry - only looks at the inadequacy of speaking and communciation - joy!

Herbert's Poetry - haven't started yet

Part 4

Agamemnon - A woman kills her husband and his mistress for sacrificing their daughter

Seamus Heaney's poetry - this is good nice although some poems are sad "Midterm break"

Fly Away Peter - the main character's Utopia is destroyed and he is killed in war

Sula - the crazy woman, watches a 4year old boy drown, watches her mother be steamed to death, her grandmother suffocates her uncle, sleeps with her best friends husband, then she dies and then half the towns people die in a bridge collapse - morbid. Yet I quite liked it.

Edited October 13, 2007 by Bandev

[Enter Sandman]

Mine aren't so bad:

Part 1

1. A Doll's House - nice and short.

2. One Day In The Life Of Ivan Denisovich - very grim and gritty but very well written - did my first worldlit on this and the next text

3. Antigone

Part 2 (err...I forgot which one of the orals its supposed to be so I ll just assume this one is the cassete oral)

1. Macbeth

2. A bunch of poems from Robert Frost

3. A bunch of poems from Keats

4. A bunch of poems from Eliot

5. The Sir Roger De Coverley papers (well somehting like that, I can't remember the exact title)

Part 3 (again, don't know what this is supposed to represent but I'm assuming it's the oral presentation)

1. A Passage To India

2. The River Between

3. A Streetcar Named Desire

4. The Government Inspector

5. Sons And Lovers

Part 4 (Exam texts, right?)

1. The Importance Of Being Earnest - this one's a riot

2. King Oedipus - yeah I know what you mean HMSChocolate

3. The Glass Menagerie

4. Juno And The Paycock - I hate this dumb play..I know what happens in the story but I haven't read the whole thing and I don't plan to

[~Lc~]

Part 3 (again, don't know what this is supposed to represent but I'm assuming it's the oral presentation)

Part 4 (Exam texts, right?)

part 3 are your paper 3 texts, part 4 are for your oral presentation.

[Enter Sandman]

Ah ok, thanks. Blimey, you guys finished your exams ages ago and you still remember this stuff perfectly? I'm making it a point to forget all of this as soon as I come out of that examination room sometime in the next three months.

[~Lc~]

Ah ok, thanks. Blimey, you guys finished your exams ages ago and you still remember this stuff perfectly? I'm making it a point to forget all of this as soon as I come out of that examination room sometime in the next three months.

yea thought I might as well though here I am admining an IB forum and still asnwering TOK requests

[Ruan Chun Xian]

Bandev: I did Seamus Heaney for IGCSE. I still remember one poem - Turkey Observed, because I wrote all my semester, mock and real exams on that poem. I knew it perfectly by the end of IGCSE. My favourite though has to be The Follower.

Well at least you guys had some works that didn't entirely focus on death and doom. Seriously, my Eng teacher is great but even he admits that the list he'd chosen was just plain depressing.

[Bandev]

Seamus Heaney is awesome in my opinion that is why I choose him to do for my IOP, and I did my favourite poem of his in it: The Otter, I know it off by heart, I compared it with Badgers, and my teacher said I would be happy with the mark I got so the that is good, especially considering I changed from Agamemnon to Heaney a week and a half before I presented the oral.

[Guest navdeepdunn]

Not very. Well the Waste Land is but tht is too mashup 2 b depressing!King Lear's jokes.Not really sure wots goin on in Measure for MeasureBig in the TwainNo pain no Twain!

[Guest lina]

ooo one of my texts is a dolls house and i like it casue it's short ^.^

plus you can ultra BS on it, im using it for WL2, hope it works well

other books we did were our countrys good, wide sargasso sea, adn heat and dust. the latter is horrrrrrrible, it was torture. be glad youre not doing it.

for schools choice my teacher chose these amazing books, seasons of migration by tayeb salih adn story of zahra by hana al sheikh, read them in your free time

good luck guys

[~Lc~]

we were supposed to do the story of Zohra, but my teacher switched it with beloved. I didn't mind beloved so much, but as the title says my A1 books were as depressing as HMS's

[Guest AmeHoshi]

...Wow. That IS pretty depressing.

I don't have any opinions or any ideas about many of the texts that I'll be doing, since I only entered senior year and will be reading them later on. :/ But I do have a list:

For the oral commentary:

-Macbeth

-Othello

-Poetry of Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath, and Elizabeth Bishop

-Teaching a Stone to Talk

The writing exam:

-The Sound of Waves: (It's more of a fairy tale. Finished it just yesterday and I thought it was nicely written. Ended with a happy ever after. ^__^ Which is nice considering that the majority of the books we read last year ended... in a twisted way)

-Their Eyes Were Watching God

-Beloved

-The House of Spirits

I did hear that "Their Eyes Were Watching God" and "The House of Spirits" were good, though.

[~Lc~]

yea alot of people say their eyes is good, but I hated it it took me ages to understand most of it, and I fell asleep a few times while reading it

beloved was a tad more interesting though! except all the parts with the animals... I won't spoil it for you but you'll know what i'm talking about once u read it

[Ruan Chun Xian]

I was thinking of buying Beloved when I was at the uni bookshop the other day...but then I've already bought a whole load of books this month and really shouldn't spend any more money on books since I'm close to being broke right now...

One thing I hate (or love, depending on how you look at it) about my campus (I'm pretty much resigned to the hills by now) is that I pass the bookshop every single day I'm there...and I am a bit addicted to book shopping. You get me into a bookstore and I'd buy the whole place if I had the money. Seriously, I'd pick up anything that looks remotely interesting...

[Bandev]

That sounds like one of my friends. His grandmother gives him $200 for books each month, and he actually spends it all on books and then actually reads the books.

[~Lc~]

I bought 4 books when I was in Cyprus, and I'm the kind of people who go mad if one page bends!

but to save money, I started looking for copies of the books I wanted which were a bit ruined (someone dropped water on Eragon, so I got to buy it with half price ) but really, I'm going to be just as broke when I'm at Uni hien

[Guest glittery_butterfly]

i did perfume::: more twisted than depressing id say. but its a must read!! be prepared to get FREAKED

[Caitlin]

Oh my God, our texts have everything - death, rape, torture, incest, insanity... you name it, it's in there. Makes for fun English classes though, when boys have to read the sex scenes.

[Bandev]

One of my friends for her IOC had to do a passage in a poem that had explicit sexual references, eg "delirous love jelly" I am sure it would have been awkward more awkward than when I had to analyse that passage and explain it to the class, and have my teacher yell out in the middle of my first sentence 'finally we are talking about sex' can you imagine how that would be for her son who is in my class.

[Ruan Chun Xian]

i did perfume::: more twisted than depressing id say. but its a must read!! be prepared to get FREAKED

Yup I just read Perfume. Twisted is definitely the word I'd use it for. I was a bit...erm...grossed out by the orgy scene at his execution. Well...grossed out is not the right word, it's not precisely that...I don't know. Anyway, the middle dragged a bit but the end had me hooked.

Makes for fun English classes though, when boys have to read the sex scenes.

One of my friends for her IOC had to do a passage in a poem that had explicit sexual references, eg "delirous love jelly" I am sure it would have been awkward more awkward than when I had to analyse that passage and explain it to the class, and have my teacher yell out in the middle of my first sentence 'finally we are talking about sex' can you imagine how that would be for her son who is in my class.

ROFL. I remember having this really weird conversation about sex in English when we were reading Miss Julie. Something about her (Julie) being on top. Don't ask what took us to that convo, I have no idea. We go off tangent a lot in my Eng class. What was weirder was the class was 4 girls, 1 guy and a male teacher.

Oh and there was this explicit scene in The Handmaid's Tale, but we didn't read that together as a class.

my teacher yell out in the middle of my first sentence 'finally we are talking about sex' can you imagine how that would be for her son who is in my class.

I can imagine. LOL. I had a guy in my Geog class - his dad was the IBC and our Geog teacher. Imagine a conversation about population that somehow drifted to contraception and why our teacher only had 2 kids.