Revolution and idealism — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Revolution and idealism
Themes
What you need to know
How Orwell explores the ideals of the Rebellion and how they are betrayed 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: 'Rings shall vanish from our noses, / And the harness from our back', 'Riches more than mind can picture', 'Almost overnight we could become rich and free.', 'Yes, it was theirs—everything that they could see was theirs!', 'the farmhouse should be preserved as a museum', 'an unalterable law by which all the animals on Animal Farm must live for ever after', 'the future Republic of the Animals which would arise when the human race had been finally overthrown', 'In Beasts of England we expressed our longing for a better society in days to come.', 'But that society has now been established.', 'None of the old dreams had been abandoned.', 'Some day it was coming: it might not be soon'.
Hope and disillusion: how the animals keep their faith in the Rebellion even at the end, and what Orwell suggests about revolutions.
Context: the hopes of the 1917 revolution, and Orwell's view that the Soviet Union had become a hierarchical society instead of moving towards socialism.
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.
