Science, ethics and society — OCR GCSE English Literature J352
OCR GCSE English Literature · J352
Science, ethics and society
Themes
What you need to know
How Ishiguro explores science, the ethics of cloning, and a society that chooses not to see the people it uses 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: 'He'd just come through his third donation', 'he must have known he wasn't going to make it', 'before you're even middle-aged, you'll start to donate your vital organs', 'More scientific, efficient, yes', 'What could I do', 'What harm is there'.
A system presented as ordinary: donations, carers, recovery centres and completion, the medical checks and the ban on smoking, and a public that prefers not to look.
The Morningdale scandal and the fear of children made superior to everyone else, and Madame's vision of a world that is more efficient but cruel.
Context: cloning after Dolly the sheep in 1996, and Ishiguro's later warning that gene editing could 'create people who are superior to others'.
Quotations are short phrases of a few words, the way you would learn them for a closed-book exam.
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.
