Power and corruption — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Power and corruption
Themes
What you need to know
How Orwell explores power, privilege and how the pigs become the masters they overthrew 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: 'no animal must ever tyrannise over his own kind', 'With their superior knowledge it was natural that they should assume the leadership.', 'should be reserved for the pigs alone', 'It was also more suited to the dignity of the Leader', 'when a pig and any other animal met on the path, the other animal must stand aside', 'all pigs, of whatever degree, were to have the privilege of wearing green ribbons on their tails on Sundays', 'half a gallon for Napoleon himself, which was always served to him in the Crown Derby soup tureen', 'Napoleon, wearing an old bowler hat of Mr. Jones's', 'the pigs took Mr. Jones's clothes out of the wardrobes and put them on', 'Napoleon was so gratified that he left his place and came round the table to clink his mug against Mr. Pilkington's'.
How each privilege prepares the next, from the milk and apples to the farmhouse, the beds, the whisky and the whip.
Context: Stalin's rise from party official to dictator, and Orwell's view that such a revolution brings only a change of masters.
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.
