Age and generations — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Age and generations
Themes
What you need to know
How Priestley explores the difference between the older and younger generations across the text, and why it matters to the text's meaning.
Where it appears, the key quotations that show it, and different ways it can be interpreted.
Evidence from the beginning, middle and end of the text.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'the famous younger generation who know it all', 'We often do on the young ones. They're more impressionable.', 'It frightens me the way you talk', 'You're not the kind of father a chap could go to when he's in trouble', 'I suppose we're all nice people now', 'In the morning they'll be as amused as we are'.
Why Priestley places his hope in the young, and where Gerald stands.
OCR's question on this text has two parts on the same text. Part (a), 20 marks, compares a printed extract from it with an unseen extract of the same genre, and weights your response (AO1) and context (AO3) twice as heavily as language analysis (AO2), where context means the social and cultural situations you can infer from the two extracts and their introductions; an answer on only one of the two extracts cannot go above Level 3. Part (b), 20 marks, explores another moment in the same text from memory, with response and analysis of language, form and structure (AO1 and AO2) equally weighted and no marks for context. Each worked paragraph and exam tip is labelled with the part it is for.
