What’s in a title?

Here is some advice from the most recent examiners’ report:

The key word, ‘How’ usually features in good tasks, allowing candidates to engage with authorial craft. … The best responses came from candidates who were able to study sections of text closely and relate them convincingly to the whole.

So you want to find an aspect of the work that you find interesting, and make that the focus of your task: perhaps something prompted by the questions in your study guide. Then frame a question that asks about how Conrad explores or expresses that focus.  Then find probably no more than two to four sections of the text that illustrate that aspect, and analyse them in depth.

Feel free to discuss your questions and approaches here.

More Heart of Darkness

Now we have finished reading the text, you may wish to do some reading, and listening, about it, to help you refelect on your own thoughts and responses.

I will be alternating my marking today with uploading links to some resources on the pre-1914 prose page.

Lots of questions are of course raised by the final pages of the book. Perhaps you could continue our discussions by raising some of those questions for yourself, here, and seeing what responses you get. Perhaps I could get the ball rolling by asking what you think of Mr Kurtz’s last words: “The horror! The horror!” And why does Conrad have Marlow lie to Kurtz’s ‘Intended’ that the last thing he said was her name?