English A subject report · May 2010

May 2010 extended essay reports Page 1 © International Baccalaureate Organization 2010 ENGLISH A1 This is a supplementary report following the May 2010 session and should be read in conjunction with the May 2009 extended essay report. Overall grade boundaries Grade: E D C B A Mark range: 0 - 7 8 - 15 16 - 22 23 - 28 29 - 36 The range and suitability of the work submitted Examiners were again generally impressed by the range and variety of the topics attempted (from Chaucer to Bob Dylan, as one examiner put it), with many stronger candidates looking beyond the classical canon to find challenging texts and productive researc h questions. There were excellent essays on Kerouac’s On the Road and on Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses ; on ‘Explorations of identity and authority in three stories by Angela Carter’ and on a comparison of Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Murakami’s ‘The E lephant Vanishes’; and on ‘Obsession in Jean Rhys’s The Wide Sargasso Sea ’ and ‘Don Delillo’s White Noise as postmodernism’s memento mori’. Working within the canon, one candidate produced a brilliant essay on the depiction of French women in three Shakesp eare plays, while another presented a careful and thoughtful analysis of the treatment of reason and passion in Hamlet and Sidney’s Old Arcadia . In many of the best essays the research question was firmly focused on literary technique, with titles such as: ‘Exploring the unreliable narrative voice and the problem of memory in Kazuo Ishiguro’s When we were Orphans ’, or ‘Food imagery in Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God’s Wife ’. Framing the investigation in this way prevents candidates from lapsing into simply re -telling the story, which is the common failing of weaker essays. At the other end of the scale there were many ess ays on popular teenage fiction which rarely rose above enthusiastic but uncritical exposition of theme and character. Such text s proved insufficiently challenging for a satisfactory literary essay, though some candidates managed to lift their work a little above the mediocre by pairing the contemporary vampire story with a novel such as Dracula. There were, as always, a