Introduction
The fourth in the Englishedu series on ‘frameworks’ for A Level English Literature, this guide explores how to analyse authors’ uses of setting in novels, short stories or prose extracts in order to allow students access to the highest grades.
Setting, places and scenes: Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
The most straightforward way of demonstrating how to closely analyse a text in terms of the theme above is to exemplify it. The extract below is followed by a series of bullet points which demonstrate how to analyse closely using carefully chosen quotations in a variety of ways. These bullet points also include commentaries which aim to explain how and why such sections have been analysed and what they could highlight within the main text, contextually and thematically.
There are, of course, many more things that could be said about each extract, but it’s hoped that it will prove useful in your initial teaching stages to model it using the examples and then to ask students to find other things that they could analyse themselves as well as to consider ‘alternative’ interpretations and to derive possible contextual aspects.
From Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
A few miles south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green. The water is warm too, for it has slipped...
