Detailed Notes on Comparative Text - Small Things Like These and Shawshank Redemption

Hay Fever Apology & Course Overview

  • Apology for sounding congested due to severe hay fever.
  • Course has three weeks remaining.
  • Today: 30-mark question exploration, focusing on 'Small Things Like These' through a cultural context lens.
  • Next: Start 'Shawshank Redemption' to expand answer structures (applicable to all texts).
  • Following week: Finish 'Shawshank Redemption' insights.
  • Final sessions: Kavanaugh's sonnets as a backup (structural issues focus).
  • Notes updated in digital format on Moodle (comparative question, Shawshank, Small Things Like These).

Exam Structure Reminders

  • Avoid common mistakes:
    • Using two films.
    • Using Shakespeare in both comparative and single texts.
  • Anchor Text: Use a text you know well for the 30-mark question, adding others later.

Diving into Small Things Like These

  • Emphasize enjoyment and engagement with the text.
  • 'Small Things Like These' is a spectacular novella presenting challenging ideas.
  • Forces readers to confront tricky home truths (e.g., last mother and baby home closed in 1996).

Structure of the 30-Mark Question

  • Avoid treating it as a free-rein single text analysis.
  • Frame response to facilitate comparisons.
  • Content is important, but comparison is key.
  • Acknowledge and embrace "shoehorning": artificiality in comparative texts is inevitable.

Examples of Framing for Comparison

  • Example 1 (Gender): "Whereas in 'Small Things Like These,' we saw gender being an important way of denoting a character's status, in 'Shawshank,' where there is virtually exclusively men, it is per se it is the perceived value to the warden that determines the relative power of each inmate."
  • Key Element: Power dynamics – who has it and who doesn't.
  • Example 2 (Economic Factors): "Unlike 'Small Things Like These,' where Bill Furlong lives in a very economically precarious environment, Andy Dufresne in 'Shawshank' has quietly built up a significant, if corrupting criminal, nest egg upon which to retire after his escape."
  • Sow the seeds of later comparisons in the 30-mark question.

Anchor Text Strategy

  • Still useful to have an anchor text (despite not being explicitly mentioned in the curriculum).
  • Choose a text you're comfortable with and have detailed knowledge of (often a novel for easier quoting).

Cultural Context Question Types

  • Broad questions so all texts can fit.
  • Core Elements/Drivers:
    • Freedom enjoyed by a central character.
    • Insights into the human condition (define your keywords).
    • How those in power maintain a dominant position (2022; always a power hierarchy).
    • How rights are respected and threatened (deferred paper 2022).
    • What is a significant relationship (2021).
    • How cultural context contributed to social division or unity (2020 – choose one).
  • Common Thread: Power – who has it, wants it, keeps it, and how is it shown?

Reassurances from the Marking Scheme

  • Allow broad interpretations of freedom (economic, physical, social, intellectual).
  • Define your terms in the introduction.
  • Indicative Material Examples:
    • Hierarchical/patriarchal structures.
    • Social engineering.
    • Impact of race, religion, socioeconomic status, gender etc.
    • Inclusive societies negating social stigmas.

Converting Content Knowledge into Exam Paragraphs

  • Focus on establishing the dynamic within the novel.
  • Key Moments/Scenes: Opening of the text.
  • Expectation Setting: Two things establish terms of cultural context:

Proclamation of the Irish Republic

  • Kara Keegan includes a section to highlight what's up for grabs and the stated goals of the 1916 rising.
  • Key Aspects:
    • Irish Republic claims allegiance of every Irish man and woman.
    • Guarantees religious and civil liberties.
    • Equal rights and opportunities to all citizens.
    • Resolve to pursue happiness and prosperity, cherishing all children equally in a literal and metaphorical sense.
  • Highlights these upfront to expose the differences to modern Ireland.
    • Gender inequality. Are the poor children cherished equally by the nation?

Novel Dedication

  • Story dedicated to women and children who suffered in Ireland's mother and baby homes/Magdalene laundries.
  • Suffering isn't a discovery, it is stated upfront.

Opening Paragraph in a Cultural Context Essay Example:

  • In both the novel's dedication and its preamble, Keegan consciously frames the cultural context in a manner that highlights the contrast between the stated aims of the Irish Republic during the 1916 Proclamation and the grim reality of life in the 1980s. In highlighting this aspect of the text cultural context, it exposes the hypocrisy of those in the novel with political political, economic, and religious power and influence. In particular, by highlighting the proclamation's reference to the, quote, equal rights and equal opportunities of its citizens, which are self evidently lacking in the narrative described, we see the relative powerlessness of its protagonist, Bill Furlong. Moreover, the dedication to the women and children who suffer time in Ireland's mother and baby homes in Magdalene Laundry's can be seen as a specific rebuke to the proclamation's claim to seem to be desired to cherish to cherish all the children of the nation equally in both a literal and figurative sense or literal and metaphorical sense, you could say. Not only are the Irish women whose allegiance the proclamation claims consistently marginalized and imprisoned in the laundries, but the idea of representing any degree of happiness and prosperity of the whole nation is exposed to the novel's developing narrative."

Metaphorical Conveyance: Pathetic Fallacy

  • Environment/weather reflects the status and themes of the novel.
  • October: yellow trees, clocks go back, long November winds.
  • New Ross: chimneys throwing out smoke, river dark as stout.
  • Unhappy people enduring the weather.
  • Shopkeepers/tradesmen commenting on cold/rain (negative attitude).
  • Children pulling up hoods, mothers hardly daring to hang clothes (stagnation).
  • Nights come on, frost takes hold, sliding under doors (poor house construction).
  • Those who still knelt to say the rosary.
  • Overall establishment process has multiple elements to it – from literal to metaphorical presentations.

First Line of Protagonist Bill Furlong

  • Quote: "She, which is the the coal man, she's on the road every hour of the day. We could soon be on the rims."
    • Reflects exhaustion, overuse, lack of maintenance.
    • Broader significance: Entire overstrained/overworked society that is not being maintained properly.

Economic Hardship and Metaphorical Crystallization

  • Metaphorical elements crystallize as the novella progresses.
  • Early passage highlighting economic precarity:
  • It would be the easiest thing in the world to lose everything. Furlong knew" from Furlong's economic state, he actually comes from incredible poverty.
    • Furlong comes from poverty, has something to lose (wife, kids, business).
    • Dole queues getting longer, people can’t pay ESB bills (electricity). Living in houses no warmer than bunkers, sleeping in their overcoats.
    • Dole:The unemployment benefit line.
    • Women lining up on the first Friday of every month waiting for children's allowances (living hand to mouth. But this shows that they are living what we will call living hand to mouth).
    • Cows not being milked because men had “upped suddenly and taken the boat to England.”
    • Men selling jeeps to pay bank bills.
    • Young boy drinking milk out of the cat's bowl behind the priest's house (foreshadowing for later suffering).
  • Other factors:
    • Emigration to London/Boston (predictable part of Irish life – migration up to 50,000 a year at time.).
    • Shipyard closure, redundancies (Bennett letting 11 employees go).
    • Dole queues.

Shoehorning Economic Material

  • Question: Discuss the extent to which individual rights are respected or threatened in the cultural context established in one text on your course.
  • What are individual rights? Set the terms:
    • Characters have the right to make autonomous decisions.
    • The power to carry out those decisions without external interference.
  • Focus here on introduction and conclusion:
    • Individual rights are continually threatened by the domineering power of the nuns in New Ross in the New Ross conference so evocatively if harrowingly portrayed by Claire Keegan in her novella, Small Things Like These. But the economic conditions of Ireland also dramatically limit the individual rights and freedoms of Irish citizens.
    • As a child, Furlong had had been very poor indeed. The ability to get a 500 piece jigsaw puzzle for a Christmas is a very good illustration of that. It's told to us within the story, but this is contrasted with his own meager economic progress. Ironically, this makes him more vulnerable as he now has something to lose. It would be the easiest thing in the world to lose everything for a long new. He he had his right to grow and develop vindicated, but the young schoolboy drinking the milk out of the cat's bowl behind the priest's house certainly had been denied the material things needed to sustain a healthy, flourishing, and productive life in his community.

Personal Freedom & Introduction

  • Question: Discuss the extent to which the level of freedom enjoyed by a central character in one text in your comparative course is determined by the character's social position and status.
    • Throughout the novel, Bill Furlong enjoys a relatively low level of freedom because of his social position within New Ross society. He is described by Keegan as having, quote, come from nothing as the result of being the child of an unmarried mother, but rises to a degree to be the proprietor of a coal and timber yard. However, during the majority of the action, his ability to act independently with true freedom, I'm I'm trying to be a bit heavy handed here, is limited by his dependence on the church and the conservative Irish society on whose patronage patronage means they will be your customers. Right? Patronage, he is completely economic dependent. Even his own wife, Aileen, partly colludes or goes along with, colludes with the power maintained by the church, responding to Furlong's bedtime questions. There are £50 note, the extra bonus that they get.

Strikingly, here's were the conclusion of this might go

  • When Furlong decides he can no longer tolerate the dreadful conditions in which the girls [in] the Magdalene laundries are confined that he challenges the limitations on his freedom. Keegan evocatively describes this process by saying that Furlong’s, quote, fear more than outweighed his other every other feeling, illustrating the scale of risk that was involved in standing up to the nuns. But Keegan leaves the audience or the reader with no hopeful sense that Furlong, quote legitimately believed that they would manage. In other words, in asserting his freedom, he is knowingly risking whatever small amount of social standing he has accrued or built up, but he does it regardless. He he goes against the even though he knows there might be a backlash because it's the right thing to do.

Gender Power Dynamics

  • Key Question from 2022: Discuss how those in power in society maintain their dominant position.
    • Who are the powerful and unpowerful women? How do they compare to men?

Example of Keegan’s writing. From approximately halfway through

  • There was other talk too about the place, the place of the convent. Some said that the that the training school girls, as they were known, weren't students of anything, but girls of low character who spent their days being reformed, doing penance by washing stains out of the dirty linen, and they worked from dawn till night. The local nurse had told that she'd been called out to treat a 15 year old with varicose veins from standing so long at the washtubs. Others claimed that it was the nuns themselves who did the work, who worked their fingers to the bone, knitting iron jumpers and threading rosary beads for export, that they had hearts of gold and problems with their eyes and weren't allowed to speak only to pray, and that some were fed no more than bread and butter for half the day but were allowed a hot dinner in the evenings once the work was done. Others swore the place was no better than a mother and baby home were common. Unmarried girls went in to be hidden away after they had given birth, saying it was their own people who had put them in after their their illegitimates had been adopted out to rich Americans or sent off to Australia, that the nuns got good money by placing these babies out foreign, and it was an industry they had going
    *All these competing versions are how, the story of how, the nuances are revealed to us in the novel.
  • The nuns: they have control. They have the money the get from adopting out the babies.
    *They control the education: only the girls of a certain quality succeed within the convent.
  • Look at the description we are given about the convent: The convent was a powerful looking place on the hill at the far side of the river, with black, wide open gates and a host of tall shining windows facing the town.
  • Even the position of the the convent in the town, its architectural power is very important.
    *Maybe the priest will be better if you don't like the nuns. Well, miss Keogh says, sure. Aren't they all the same? Had miss Keogh told them as much."

Core thoughts about the Novel

  • It is an incredibly restrained novel.
  • Towards the end of the novel:
  • The process of decision making is revealed very slowly. This is a remarkable piece of storytelling:
    He doesn't know (why he's doing what he's doing), We don't know why (why he’s doing what he's doing.)
    (Both the Character and the reader works it out as they go along.)
    If this book had been written in 1985, it would have been written by about a By a woman the lead character would have been written by a Woman
    Bill Furlong as Embodyment of Ireland.
    He’s the Microcosm or miniture story of Ireland.
    Story/Plot ends. Act of Defiance
    Irish Society Said “No”. – Ireland Does Liberalizes
    That's the Meta narrative of the of the of the text.

Commencing the Shawshank Redemption

  • I'm particularly gonna dive into some of the ways in which we show off our critical literacy, which is, you know, treating a play like a play, a film like a film. It also means we are going to use the genre specific terminology
    What are some of the ways in which power is shown to us in a, in a, in a, in a text? There are multiple ways in which we can interpret that
    Example Overall take:
    In the Hollywood prison drama, The Shawshank Redemption, hereafter The Shawshank, remember to save ourselves time, the director Frank Darabont used a complex sound and music design, both dejectic and nondegetic, to help explain who has and, who has power there should be no common error. Who has power and control over the world of the text.
  • Dejectic sound is what the characters themselves can hear. Nondegetic sound is added onto to create a sense of tension or beatuy or loneliness
    Thomas Newman's evocative scoring and the periodic incorporation of contemporary music both establishes the timeline of the film while also allowing characters to temporarily transcend their restrictions.
    *
    The use of the track, if I didn't care, by the ink spots, and I'm gonna try and highlight some more film language. We have our dejectic and nondegetic sound up there. I'm gonna do more of these as I go along. If I didn't care about the ink spots, in the opening scene, used transgegetically, in other words, transferring from the soundtrack to Andy Dufresne's car radio. Is an important aspect for the sound quality.* But perhaps the most important use of dejected sound or music within the film is the use of the duetino solaria from the Marriage of Figaro. Now I've seen in a whole load of other notes it called duetino solaria. Well, duetino means a short duet.
    What would look like a when we add in the other two text on the forte question? What would that next section next section look like?
    *Everwhere in the film, the sound of prison door buzzers and sirens punctuate the soundtrack to emphasize that the inmates in Shawshank prison must live to the harsh timetable established by the ward. That can become a weak
    Therefore, every using every tool in the director and composer's arsenal, the emotional stakes of the film are heightened to guarantee that even the most hardened of cynics, like the most hardened of criminals in the film, can emotionally engage with the film and recognize the cultural context factors that reveal to that should be real reveal to us. Excuse me. Reveal to us the established power systems.