YISHUN JUNIOR COLLEGE

PRELIMINARY EXAMINATIONS

LITERATURE IN ENGLISH 9725/03

HIGHER 2

Paper 3 Modern Writing 21 August 2008

3 HOURS

Additional materials: Writing paper

YISHUN JUNIOR COLLEGE YISHUN JUNIOR COLLEGE YISHUN JUNIOR COLLEGE YISHUN JUNIOR COLLEGE YISHUN JUNIOR COLLEGE
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INFORMATION FOR CANDIDATES

Set texts may be taken into the examination room.
Texts may bear underlining or highlighting. Nothing should be written in the texts.
Any kind of folding or flagging in the texts (e.g. use of post-its, tape flags or paper
clips) is not permitted.

READ THESE INSTRUCTIONS

Write your name and CTG on all the work you hand in.
Write in dark blue or black pen on both sides of the paper.
Do not use staples, paper clips, highlighters, glue or correction fluid.

Answer three questions: one from each of Sections A, B and C.

You are reminded of the need for good English and clear presentation in your
answers.

Start each question on a fresh sheet of paper.

If you are unable to attempt the paper, submit a blank sheet with your name and
CTG.

At the end of the examination, fasten all your work securely together.
All questions in this paper carry equal marks.

Setters: Mr George Spencer & Mr Eugene Sng

This document consists of five printed pages and one blank page.
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Section A

Answer one question in this section

Q1

Either (a) Comment critically on the poem below by Louis MacNeice (published in
the late 1930s), paying attention to ways in which its style and concerns
are characteristic of the period you have studied.

The British Reading Room

Under the hive-like dome, the stooping haunted readers

Go up and down the alleys, tap the cells of knowledge –
Honey and wax, the accumulation of years …
Some on commission, some for the love of learning,
Some because they have nothing better to do 5
Or because they hope these walls of books will deaden
The drumming of the demon in their ears.

Cranks, hacks, poverty-stricken scholars,

In pince-nez, period hats or romantic beards
And cherishing their hobby or their doom, 10
Some are too much alive and some are asleep
Hanging like bats in a world of inverted values,
Folded up in themselves in a world which is safe and silent:
This is the British Museum Reading Room.

Out on the steps in the sun the pigeons are courting, 15

Puffing their ruffs and sweeping their tails or taking
A sun-bath at their ease.
And under the totem poles – the ancient terror –
Between the enormous fluted Ionic columns
There seeps from heavily jowled or hawk-like foreign faces 20
The guttural sorrow of the refugees.
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Or

(b) Comment in detail on the following excerpt from a novel by Virginia

Woolf (1882-1941). Discuss how her style and thematic concerns in this
passage are reflective of the period studied.
But his son hated him. He hated him for coming up to them for stopping and
looking down on them; for his exactingness and egotism (for there he stood,
commanding them to attend him); but most of all he hated the twang and twitter of
his father’s emotion which, vibrating around them, disturbed the perfect simplicity
and good sense of his relations with his mother. By looking fixedly at the page, he 5
hoped to make him move on; by pointing his finger at a word, he hoped to recall his
mother’s attention, which, he knew angrily, wavered instantly his father stopped. But
no. Nothing would make Mr Ramsay move on. There he stood demanding sympathy.
Mrs Ramsay, who had been sitting loosely, folding her son in her arm,
braced herself, and, half turning, seemed to raise herself with an effort, and at once to 10
pour erect into the air a rain of energy, a column of spray, looking at the same time
animated and alive as if all her energies were being fused into a force, burning and
illuminating (quietly though she sat, taking up her stocking again), and into this
delicious fecundity, this fountain and spray of life, the fatal sterility of the male
plunged itself, like a beak of brass, barren and bare. He wanted sympathy. He was a 15
failure, he said. Mrs Ramsay flashed her needles. Mr Ramsay repeated, never taking
his eyes from her face, that he was a failure. She blew the words back at him.
‘Charles Tansley…’ she said. But he must have more than that. It was sympathy he
wanted, to be assured of his genius, first of all, and then to be taken within the circle
of his life, warmed and soothed, to have his senses restored to him, his barrenness 20
made fertile, and all the rooms of the house made full of life – the drawing-room;
behind the drawing-room the kitchen; above the kitchen the bedrooms; and beyond
them the nurseries; they must be furnished, they must be filled with life.
Charles Tansley thought him the greatest metaphysician of the time, she
said. But he must have more than that. He must have sympathy. He must be assured 25
that he too lived in the heart of life; was needed; not here only, but all over the
world. Flashing her needles, confident, upright, she created drawing-room and
kitchen, set them all aglow; bade him take his ease there, go in and out, enjoy
himself. She laughed, she knitted. Standing between her knees, very stiff, James felt
all her strength flaring up to be drunk and quenched by the beak of brass, the arid 30
scimitar of the male, which smote mercilessly, again and again, demanding
sympathy.
He was a failure, he repeated. Well, look then, feel then. Flashing her
needles, glancing about her, out of the window, into the room, at James himself, she
assured him, beyond a shadow of doubt, by her laugh, her poise, her competence (as 35
a nurse carrying a light across a dark room assures a fractious child), that it was real;
the house was full; the garden blowing. If he put implicit faith in her, nothing should
hurt him; however deep he buried himself or climbed high, not for a second should
he find himself without her. So boasting of her capacity to surround and protect,
there was scarcely a shell of herself left for her to know herself by; all was so 40
lavished and spent; and James, as he stood stiff between her knees, felt her rise in a
rose-flowered fruit tree laid with leaves and dancing boughs into which the beak of
brass, the arid scimitar of his father, the egotistical man, plunged and smote,
demanding sympathy.
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Section B

Answer one question in this section, using two texts you have studied. The texts
used in this section cannot be used in Section C.

Q2

Either (a) Compare the ways in which two texts by modern writers make use
of irony.

Or (b) Discuss with reference to two texts by modern writers, how the
texts function as commentaries of human affairs.
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Section C

Answer one question in this section, using one text that you have studied.
The text used in this section cannot be used in Section B.

Wilfred Owen: Collected Poems

Q3

Either (a) ‘In time of war, the first casualty is truth.’ Brook Carter.

Discuss Owen’s portrayal of the truth of World War 1 in the light

of this statement.

Or (b) ‘… when each proud fighter brags

He wars on Death - for lives; not men - for flags.’

With close reference to two or three poems in the selection,

discuss Owen’s portrayal of soldierly camaraderie.

F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby

Q4

Either (a) Referring closely to particular episodes, examine how American

society is presented in The Great Gatsby.

Or (b) How much of Jimmy Gatz survives in Jay Gatsby?

Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness

Q5

Either (a) To what extent is Joseph Conrad’s novella a critique of

contemporary imperialism?

Or (b) What is the nature of the relationship between Marlow and Kurtz
and how does this effect the outcome of the novella?

End of Paper