compare the ways in which the writers of your chosen texts present storytelling and memory

Thesis

• Both Atwood and Shelley use storytelling and memory to shape reality

• Atwood, influenced by growing censorship from 20th century totalitarian regimes, explore how storytelling and memory are necessary for survival and resistance

• While Shelley, influenced by Romantic concepts surrounding tabula rasa, explore how storytelling and memory can influence identity and destruction

• perhaps the authors aim to emphasise the power of weaponising knowledge

both = storytelling and memory shape reality

HMT = storytelling and memory in religious indoctrination

Frank = storytelling and memory shape our perception of the creature

AO1

• HMT

  • roles in society = commanders, wives, handmaids, angels, eyes

  • ‘all flesh is weak. all flesh is grass, I corrected her’

  • ‘God made them that way but he did not make you that way’

  • ‘forgive them, for they not know what they do’

  • ‘blessed are the meek. she didn’t go on to say anything about inheritying the earth’

  • ‘blessed are the silent. I knoew they made that up’

  • epigraph = rachel and leah

• Frank = creature narrative vs victors

  • ‘such a thing that Dante could not have conceieved’

  • ‘wretch’ ‘miserable monster’ ‘demonical corpse’ ‘half extinguished light’

  • ‘the deformity of its aspect more hideous than belongs to humanity’

  • ‘I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel’

  • ‘I was benevolent and good, misery made me a fiend’

  • ‘shall I respect man who he condemns me’

  • ‘did I request thee, maker, from my clay to mould me man, did I solicit thee from darkness to promote me?’

AO2

• HMT

  • juxtapostion

  • biblical allusion

    • grass = Isaiah 40:6

    • blessed = beatitudes

  • declarative sentences

  • significance of subordinate clause

  • metaphor

• Frank

  • pronoun ‘it’

  • grotesque imagery

  • hyperbole

  • metaphor

  • rehtorical question

  • eloquent language

  • unreliable narrators

AO3

• HMT

  • cold war surveillance

  • feminism

  • politics and religion

  • rachel and leah

• Frank

  • noble savage

  • rousseau

  • paradise lost

    dantes inferno

AO4

HMT AO3

• cold war surveillance

• feminism

• politics and religion

  • Reagan emphasised conservatism and his belief in family values alluding to the traditional, heterosexual, nuclear family

  • he appealed to the white working class americans who felt racist resentment against the advances that black people had made during the civil rights movement

• rachel and leah

  • It is a teaching from the book of Genesis that forms the basis of the relationship between Handmaids, Commanders and Wives.

  • It sets up sanctioned adultery within marriage as long as the goal is to have children.

Frank AO3

• noble savage = stock character that embodies a ‘native’ or ‘outsider’ who has not been corrupted by civilisation, symbol

• rousseau = His theory was that people begin life as innocents, and may become corrupted/evil over time due to culture and society

• paradise lost

• dantes inferno = It is an allegorical story about the human soul’s journey to God, depicted as a harrowing, guided tour through the nine concentric circles of Hell

Both = necessary for identity

HMT = necessary for survival of identity

Frank = necessary for shaping identity

AO1

• HMT

  • ‘I could smell, faintly like an afterimage, the pungent scent of sweat, shot through with the sweet taint of chewing gum and perfume from the watching girls’ - gymnasium chpt 1 - find more

  • the wall = ‘when it used to be a university’ ‘its red brick and must have once been plan but handsome’

  • ‘my name isn’t Offred, I have another name, which nobody uses not because its forbidden

  • ‘I keep the knowledge of this name like something hidden, som treasure I’ll comeback to dig up, one day’

  • ‘lip read’ ‘Alma. Janine. Moira. June.’ vs ‘we’

  • ‘I remember’

• Frank

  • ‘paradise lost’ and ‘the Sorrows of werter’

  • ‘like Adam, I was apparently united by no link to any other being in existence’

  • ‘like [satan] when I viewed the bliss of my protectors, the bitter gall of envy rose within me’

  • ‘I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather a fallen angel’

  • ‘memory brought madness with it and when I thought of what had passed, a real insanity possessed me’

  • ‘filthy creation’

  • ‘such a thing that Dante could not have conceieved’

  • ‘wretch’ ‘miserable monster’ ‘demonical corpse’ ‘half extinguished light’

AO2

• HMT

  • oflactory imagery = smell

  • sensory imagery

  • past tense

  • metaphor

  • collective pronoun

  • sentence fragments

  • punctuation

  • deliberate ambiguity

  • repetition

• Frank

  • hyperbole

  • semantic field of dehumanising language

  • metaphor

  • biblical allusions

AO3

• HMT

  • iranian revolution

  • feminism

  • totalitarian regimes

  • cold war

• Frank

  • paradise lost

  • sorrows of werter

  • dantes inferno

AO3

HTM AO3

Frank AO3

Both = action

HMT = necessary for resistance

Frank = necessary for destruction

AO1

• HMT

  • ‘the pen between my fingers is sensuous, alive almost, I can feel its power, the power of the words it contains. Pen Is Envy.’

  • ‘I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it'

  • ‘if it is a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending’

  • ‘you don’t tell a story to yourself’

  • ‘I will say you, you, like an old love song. you can mean more than one. you can mean thousands’

  • ‘nolite to bastardes carborundorum’

  • ‘there must be a resistance … I believe in the resistance as I believe there can be no light without shadow; or rather, now shadow unless there is also light.

  • ‘i believe your’re there, I believe you into being. because I’m telling you this story I will your existence. I tell therefore you are’

• Frank

  • ‘if i cannot inspire love, i will cause fear’

  • ‘shall I respect man when he condemns me?’

  • ‘revenge dearer than light or food’

AO2

• HMT

  • capitalisation

  • short sentence

  • personification

  • modal verb

  • metaphor

  • repetition

  • model verb

• Frank

  • rhetorical question

  • juxtaposition

AO3

• HMT

• Frank

AO3

HMT AO3

Frank AO3