NYGH 2012-S3EOY-ALit HP

Class Register Number Name 南洋女子中学校 NANYANG GIRLS' HIGH SCHOOL SECONDARY THREE END-OF-YEAR EXAMINATION 2012 Friday 5th October 1045 - 1245 Advanced Literature (HP) 2 Hours READ THESE INSTRUCTIONS FIRST 1. Write your name on your answer script. 2. Use dark blue or black pen. 3. Do not use correction fluid / tape. INFORMATION FOR CANDIDATES 1. . Answer TWO questions in total: ONE from Section A 1 ALIT (HP) EOY 2012 SB and ONE from Section B. 2. You are reminded of the need for good English and legible handwriting. Setter: SB This document consists of 7 printed pages. NANYANG GIRLS' HIGH SCHOOL [ Turn over]

SECTION A: SET TEXT Answer either question 1 or 2 Question 1: The Turn of the Screw (1) “Part of the horror arises as the reader is forced to fill in the blanks from his own experience – ‘imagining the details for himself.'” (Alexander E. Jones) To what extent do you agree with this evaluation of The Turn of the Screw? [30] Question 2: Death of a Salesman Read the extract below and answer the question that follows. BIFF: People are worse off than Willy Loman. Believe me, I’ve seen them! LINDA: Then make Charley your father, Biff. You can’t do that, can you? I don’t say he’s a great man. Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the paper. He’s not the finest character that ever lived. But he’s a human being, and a terrible thing is happening to him. So attention must be paid. He’s not to be allowed to fall into his grave like an old dog. Attention, attention must be finally paid to such a person. You called him crazy – BIFF: I didn’t mean – LINDA: No, a lot of people think he’s lost his — balance. But you don’t have to be very smart to know what his trouble is. The man is exhausted. HAPPY: Sure! 2 ALIT (HP) EOY 2012 SB

LINDA: A small man can be just as exhausted as a great man. He works for a company thirty-six years this March, opens up unheard-of territories to their trademark, and now in his old age they take his salary away. HAPPY: I didn’t know that, Mom. LINDA: You never asked, my dear! Now that you get your spending money someplace else you don’t trouble your mind with him. HAPPY: But I gave you money last – LINDA: Christmas time, fifty dollars! To fix the hot water it cost ninety-seven fifty! For five weeks he’s been on straight commission, like a beginner, an unknown. BIFF: Those ungrateful bastards! LINDA: Are they any worse than his sons? When he brought them business, when he was young, they were glad to see him. But now his old friends, the old buyers that loved him so and always found some order to hand him in a pinch — they’re all dead, retired. He used to be able to make six, seven calls a day in Boston. Now he takes his valises out of the car and puts them back and takes them out again and he’s exhausted. Instead of walking he talks now. He drives seven hundred miles, and when he gets there no one knows him any more, no one welcomes him. And what goes through a man’s mind, driving seven hundred miles home without having earned a cent? Why shouldn’t he talk to himself? Why? When he has to go to Charley’s and borrow fifty dollars a week and pretend to me that it’s his pay? How long can that go on? How long? You see what I’m sitting here and waiting for? And you tell me he has no character? The man who never worked a day but for your benefit? When does he get the medal for that? Is this his reward — to turn around at t he age of sixty-three and find his sons, who he loved better than his life..’ Death of a Salesman (Act One), Arthur Miller (2) How does the extract above further your understanding of Willy Loman as a tragic hero? Answer with close reference to the extract. [ 3 0 ] 3 ALIT (HP) EOY 2012 SB

SECTION B: LITERARY RESPONSE Answer either question 3 or 4 Question 3 Read the texts below and answer the question that follows. (i) You may think novelists always have fixed plans to which they work, so that the future predicted by Chapter One is always inexorably the actuality of Chapter Thirteen. But novelists write for countless different reasons: for money, for fame, for reviewers, for parents, for friends, for loved ones; for vanity, for pride, for curiosity, for amusement: as skilled furniture makers enjoy making furniture, as drunkards like drinking, as judges like judging, as Sicilians like emptying a shotgun into an enemy’s back. I could fill a book with reasons, and they would all be true, though not true of all. Only one same reason is shared by all of us: we wish to create worlds as real as, but other than the world that is. Or was. This is why we cannot plan. We know a world is an organism, not a machine. We also know that a genuinely created world must be independent of its creator; a planned world (a world that fully reveals its planning) is a dead world. It is only when our characters and events begin to disobey us that they begin to live. I have disgracefully broken the illusion? No. My characters still exist, and in a reality no less, or no more, real than the one I have just broken. Fiction is woven into all, as a Greek observed some two and a half thousand years ago. I find this new reality (or unreality) more valid; and I would have you share my own sense that I do not fully control these creatures of my mind, any more than you control—however hard you try, however much of a latterday Mrs. Poulteney you may be—your children, colleagues, friends, or even yourself. But this is preposterous? A character is either “real” or “imaginary”? If you think that, hypocrite lecteur*, I can only smile. You do not even think of your own past as quite real; you dress it up, you gild it or blacken it, censor it, tinker with it ... fictionalize it, in a word, and put it away on a shelf—your book, your romanced autobiography. We are all in flight from the real reality. That is a basic definition of Homo sapiens. The French Lieutenant's Woman (Chapter 13), John Fowles * hypocrite lecteur – hypocritical reader 4 ALIT (HP) EOY 2012 SB

(ii) The Thought-Fox I imagine this midnight moment's forest: Something else is alive Beside the clock's loneliness And this blank page where my fingers move. Through the window I see no star: Something more near Though deeper within darkness Is entering the loneliness: Cold, delicately as the dark snow A fox's nose touches twig, leaf; Two eyes serve a movement, that now And again now, and now, and now Sets neat prints into the snow Between trees, and warily a lame Shadow lags by stump and in hollow Of a body that is bold to come Across clearings, an eye, A widening deepening greenness, Brilliantly, concentratedly, Coming about its own business Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox It enters the dark hole of the head. The window is starless still; the clock ticks, The page is printed. Ted Hughes (3) Fowles and Hughes both explain the relationship between the writer and the text. Compare and contrast how effectively they convey their ideas through t