Introduction
The ninth in the Englishedu series on ‘frameworks’ for A Level English Literature, this guide explores and exemplifies an important requirement of many A-level English Literature teaching units, that students show how their own interpretation of a literary text is informed by their understanding that other possible interpretations exist, i.e. ‘alternative interpretations’.
‘Alternative Interpretations’: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
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 Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
‘Who could want...
