MINISTERI ET FOR 80RN OG UNDERVISNING
KVALlTETS – OG TILSYNSSTYR ELSEN
EngelskA
Studentereksamen
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delpf0ve
09.00 – 14.00
kI.
Tirsdag den 29. maj 2012 kl. 9 .00 -14.00
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Write an essay (900-1200 words) in which you analyse and interpret Robin Black’s short story”… Divorced, Beheaded, Survived”. Part of your essay must focus on the structure and the use of symbols in the short story.
Text Page “… Divorced, Beheaded, Survived”, a short story by Robin Black, 2010 . . . . . . . . . . 2
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Write an essay (900- 1200 words) in which you analyse and comment on Russell Brand’s commentary ” Big Brother isn’t watching you”. Part of your essay must focus on the style and on the writer’s attitude to the 2011 UK riots.
Text Page “Big Brother isn’t watching you”, a commentary by Russell Brand from The Guardian website, 2011 …………. .. ………………………. . 7
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Robin Black
… Divorced, Beheaded, Survived
Without question, Anne Boleyn’ was the plum role. Day after day, dusk really, in the time between school and dinner, in the small, untended yard behind my childhood home, there were fights over who would get to play her. Even the boys loved everything about being the Lady Anne. The telltale pillow under your shirt, long before the elaborate royal marriage. “Henry dear, I have wonderful news!” [… ] My older brother, Terry, was undoubtedly the most convincing. Once, he stole a dress from our mother’s closet – a red-and-white Diane von Furstenberg 2 wraparound so he could use the beltlike part to hold the couch-pillow baby, the future Queen Elizabeth, in place. “Oh, Hal,” he cooed to JeffMandelbaum from next door. “You don’t need that old Spanish cow of a wife of yours! With her sour little daughter. You just wait! I’ll give you that son you want and deserve. Right here, my sire.” With a pat to his lumpy middle.
The Essay on Story Black Time White
'Battle Royal' is the story I chose to write about and it is written by Ralph Ellison. The reason that I chose this story is because the way the author uses symbolism. The author tries to show through symbolism that there is a different meaning than what the story says. In the beginning, the story seems to be about one black boy's struggle to get ahead in a white society. He tries' to accomplish ...
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It was almost worth giving up the role yourself just to watch Terry give it his all, and it might have been, if it weren’t for the execution scene. But the beheading was just too good not to fight over. Molly Denham, from the house behind ours, whose parents were both Jungian3 analysts, usually asked to be the anonymous executioner. “Do you forgive me, My Grace?” she would intone from behind an old Batman Halloween mask, her voice as deep as she could make it, her straight yellow hair hanging to her waist. “I do, sir. I do forgive you.” And when I was Anne, I would then offer her my hand, to kiss and to hold as I knelt. Looking up to the sky, I would press my palms together, as if in prayer – or as I imagined people praying might do. Raising my own long hair up above the nape of my neck, I’d lean my head down over the chopping block – a white enameled lobster pot, turned upside down – and await the mortal blow from the black rubber axe that Molly swung. It was all Johnny Sanderson’s idea. His father was a professor in the medical school and had started up at the university the same year my father joined the history department. Those were the days when there were still teas and formal dinner parties for new faculty, and my parents and the Sandersons had struck up a friendship of sorts. Johnny was a year younger than Terry, a year older than me, and he was one of those kids who seemed to know a lot about himself before any of the rest of us had much of a clue of who we were. By that spring, when he was eleven, he knew for sure that he wanted to be a history professor, like my father. But instead of American history, his thing was Europe. [… ]
The Term Paper on Physical and psychological needs of a three year old child
In this assignment it will be discussed what constitute the main physical and psychological necessities of a toddler, more precisely a three years old child. As soon as these needs are defined, it shall be discussed how to provide, inside the environment of a childcare setting, the means to achieve the suitable conditions to satisfy such necessities, as well as selected specific capabilities that ...
, the second wife of King Henry V lII of England (1491 -1547).
famous Belgian-American fashion designer. 3 e.G. lung, Swiss psychiatrist (1875-1961).
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I don’t know exactly what satisfaction Johnny got from having us act the thing out in my backyard time and time again. [.. .) There was more to it than playacting for Johnny; a kind of intensity crept into his voice when we all gathered after school, had some juice and fruit or crackers, whatever my mother had around. A kind of edgy tension as he said, “Hey, anyone want to act out the thing again?” And he knew how to hook us all too, every time, rotating which kid would play Anne, having the good sense to hurry through the more boring wives – though he never let us wholly skip a single one. “Off with her head!” Jeff Mandelbaum would shout at the afternoon’s Jane Seymour’. “Off with her head!” “Divorced, beheaded, died,2” Johnny would correct. “The third wife died. No beheading. Jane Seymour died a natural death.” [… ) Nothing pleased me more those afternoons than when, as Molly’s axe head hit my neck, Johnny Sanderson would burst into spontaneous applause or even sometimes say, “Great, Sarah. Really, really great.” That was the spring of fourth grade for me, 1973 – the last months before Terry got sick, and then sicker, and then got better for a little bit, but then died in ’74, which shocked me when it happened, but now, thirty years later, it seems to have been as inevitable a conclusion as the strike of Molly’s axe.
To my own children, that long-neglected backyard is only part of Grandma’s and Grandpa’s house, where we go for Thanksgiving, for the Christmases we don’t spend with Lyle’s folks in California, for occasional weekend escapes from Manhattan, into Massachusetts. To see the leaves changing color. To celebrate a birthday. My mother’s seventy-fifth. My father’s eightieth. [… ) The children are too old now to play out there much when we go up, though I used to watch them dart around the wild, thornyrosebushes in games of tag, and try unsuccessfully to hide from one another behind the lean Japanese maple. Sixteen and twelve now, Mark and Coco are four years apart – we had been two apart, Terry and 1. And maybe it was superstition that made me wait that extra stretch of time before getting pregnant again. I don’t know. Lyle would have liked our children to be closer in age: “Keep the parenting years compressed.” But I put our second child off, and so my boy and girl were always just a little different from the pair we used to be. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about all the ways we try to protect our children. And ourselves. Three weeks ago, Mark’s best friend, Peter, was killed on the Long Island Expressway. That Sunday morning, I was making a special breakfast – French toast and bacon – because Co co had a friend sleeping over. The girls were still in her room, and Mark was lying on the living room couch, reading. Lyle was grading papers at the kitchen table, complaining about them as he did: “How can these children be in college and still be so close to functionally illiterate?” I had just pulled the eggs out from the fridge and held the carton in my hand when the telephone rang. It was close to ten o’clock.
The Essay on Abortion Child Love Don
Abortion Abortion. What is it? Why do people do it? Is it killing a human life? What are the benefits for having an abortion? Should it be made illegal? These questions I will try and answer on the key issue right now on abortion. I will tell you my side and how I fell, and hope that after this you would agree with my opinion. Abortion is the killing of a child before the birth. They usually take ...
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the third wife of King Henry VIII of England. a rhyme used to remember the fates of King Henry VIII’s six wives: “Divorced, beheaded, died , divorced, beheaded, survived”.
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“Can I talk to Mark?” The voice on the line was a kid, but not a voice I recognized. “Who’s calling?” It turned out to be a boy I’d known for years. “What’s the matter, Nick? You sound terrible.” As he told me, I turned my back on Lyle, who was suddenly alert, watching me. I opened the fridge and put the eggs away. “There was this party …” I’d known about the party. Mark had thought of going, but had decided he had too much work . “I don’t even think they were drinking or anything … or not much anyway … The way I heard it, the other guy, I don’t know, I think someone said it was a truck, he might’ve been stoned or something. Nobody else was even hurt .. .” The bacon on my stove crackled as Nick spoke. My back still to Lyle, I reached for a fork and turned over the strips. Lowered the heat. “Are your parents there?” I asked. They were. “We’ll call a little later, Nick. Let me talk to Mark first. We’ll be back in touch.” “Who died?” Lyle asked, before I even hung up the phone. I told him. “Jesus Christ.” “Car accident.” “Holy shit.” “Yeah. Holy shit.” I turned off the bacon. And kissed my husband’s motionless head before going in to talk to Mark. “This is the part where Anne learns for certain that she’s going to die,” Johnny Sanderson had coached us, every afternoon. “No more chances. She’s doomed. You should show a little emotion at this point.” And Terry would hold his face in both his hands, his shoulders heaving in enormous, racking, make-believe sobs. But in real life, it was all silent hours. Vacant stares. As soon as we learned Terry was sick, my house stopped being the daily gathering place. Everyone but me seemed to know what was coming. He stopped being the boy who would throw himself into anything that seemed like fun. And one by one the other children began avoiding us. We had played together all our lives, and then it ended. There was no more ease between us. Not even between my brother and me. I didn’t know how to speak to the quiet, solemn boy he had become. And he didn’t seem to need me, anymore. I sat next to my son where he lay stretched on the couch. “Hey, bud.” I took the book from his hand as I spoke, and lay it open on the tabletop. “Something’s happened, sweetheart. Something bad.” His face was still sleepy, unwashed, his brown hair a little messy. I don’t know. Maybe JeffMandelbaum’s mother saw a different side of her son after my brother died. Could detect a new thoughtfulness in his eyes. Maybe Molly Denham cried herself to sleep for weeks. Maybe Johnny Sanderson’s heart was broken. I never knew. They never told me. Johnny did go on to be a history professor, like he always said he
The Essay on Mark Twain 14
Mark Twain is important to American literature because of his novels and how they portray the American experience. Some of his best selling novels were Innocents Abroad, Life on the Mississippi, Huckleberry Finn, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. In these books, Mark Twain recalls his own adventures of steamboating on the Mississippi River. Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born on November 30, 1835 in ...
The Essay on Blake Poem London Time
In Blake's 'London' the speaker connects various characters and socio / political institutions in order to critique the injustices perpetrated in England. The busy, commercial city of London functions as a space in which the speaker can imagine the inescapable interconnections of English institution and citizens. Although separated by differences of class and gender, the citizens of London brush ...
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would. Made a name for himself at the same university where our fathers had taught. But maybe his life wasn’t exactly the way he’d always imagined it, because of what happened to my brother when we were kids. My son’s face changed as he took in the news. “He’s dead?” I nodded. He shook h is head. “No. That’s impossible. Just yesterday ” I nodded again; and he still shook his head. [… ] “Mom, he can’t be dead.” I didn’t speak. Can’t be. I know that feeling. Can’t be. But is. I don’t think about Terry every day, anymore. And sometimes I’m stunned by that fact. It isn’t only the discomfort of disloyalty I feel, it’s the fact of utter disappearance after death. The idea that as loved as we may be, we may also be forgotten. If only for a day here and there. More than a decade ago, as soon as I thought Mark was old enough to ask me questions, I made the decision to put away the picture of my brother that I had carried from my parents’ home to college, in and out of my first brief marriage, in and out of the first apartment Lyle and I shared, and finally into our family home. I took it down off the bookshelf, where it sat between myoId books – all the orange-spined Penguin classics, Shakespeare, Woolf, all that – and Lyle’s many chemistry texts. It just seemed to me to be too hard on the children, too hard on Mark particularly to have that happy boy face smiling down, and to know what had happened to that other boy. The lines between him and my own son were too easily drawn. I was afraid my brother’s face would become a fearful thing for them. And maybe for me as well, with kids of my own. So I put him in the dresser drawer I use for the few really fine scarves and gloves I possess, the softest place for storage I could find. But of course the children have always known that I had a brother and that he died. A brother named Terrance, Terry. They know about him without my ever having had to tell either of them. Uncle Terry, he would have been. It’s family information. The kind that travels in the air that children breathe. At Peter’s funeral, we lined up in a row, my husband, my two children, and I. [ .. .] We never did call Nick back, the morning that we heard. And I don’t think Mark’s spoken very much to any of his friends since then. Not about Peter. He goes off to school, and comes right home. Heads straight for his room and closes the door. Coco’s asked me if he’s going to be okay, and I tell her that he will. And I know that he will. It just takes time, I tell her. It’s only been a few weeks. It’ll take some more time.
The Essay on London Riots
In the summer of 2011, the city of London, England was disheveled. With what started as a simple police brutality protest soon turned the city upside down with riots clustering in almost every borough. Parliament abruptly returned from their summer holidays to quickly address the chaos dismantling their city’s wellbeing. Just under 2,000 riot related arrests were made by the Metropolitan police ...
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The truth is that sometimes even more than a day goes by before I remember to think of my brother. It’s only natural, I’ve told myself, time and time again. It’s human nature, I’ve
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thought – as though there’s consolation to be found in that. And maybe there is. Maybe it’s a gift to be able to let go of the remembering. Some times. Some things. “What was it like, Mom?” Mark asked me for the first time ever, yesterday. “What was it like when Uncle Terry died?” I took my son by the hand, into my room. I opened the dresser drawer and there he was, smiling out from above the softly folded scarves, the empty fingers of my own gloves seeming to want to hold him there. “It was hard,” I said to Mark, as he lifted the picture toward his face. “There is no secret answer. It was terribly, terribly hard.” When [ got to Henry VIlI in high school – European history, tenth grade – Molly Denham and I were in the same section. She still had that long, straight hair to her waist, and she wore overalls most days. The rap on her was that she smoked a Iittle dope, but not more than most kids. We weren’t really friends , anymore. And neither of us said a word to the other, not a single word, as the wives were taught, one by one. It was as though we had never spent those hours together. As though she had never held and kissed my hand. Never asked for my forgiveness, which I so freely gave. And neither of us had watched my brother in that dress, pregnant and cooing seductively to his sire. There are things that go on, I believe, important things that make only an intuitive kind of sense. Silences, agreed to. Intimacies, put away. “Divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived.” Miss Rafferty wrote the rhyme out on the board while Molly Denham and 1 dutifully copied it into our notebooks, as though we might otherwise forget.
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Russell Brand’
Big Brother isn’t watching you
Dismissing rioters as mindless isfutile rhetoric. However unacceptable the UK riots. we need to ask why they are happening.
young people in Birmingham during riots in the city centre.
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I no longer live in London. I’ve been transplanted to Los Angeles by a combination of love and money; such good fortune and opportunity, in both cases, you might think disqualify me from commenting on matters in my homeland. Even the results of Britain’s Got Ice 2Factor may lay prettily glistening beyond my remit now that I am self-banished. To be honest when I lived in England I didn’t really care too much for the fabricated theatrics of reality TV. Except when [ worked for Big Brother, then it was my job to slosh about in the amplified trivia of the housemates/inmates. Sometimes it was actually quite bloody interesting. Particularly the year that Nadia won. She was the Portuguese transsexual. Remember? No? Well, that’s the nature of the medium; as it whizzes past the eyes it seems very relevant but the malady of reality TV stars is that their shelf life expires, like dog years, by the power of seven. To me it seems as ifNadia’s triumph took place during the silver jubileel, we had a street party. Early in that series there was an incident of excitement and high tension. The testosteronal, alpha figures of the house – a Scot called Jason and a Londoner called Victor – incited by the teasing conditions and a camp lad called Marco (wow, it’s all coming back) kicked off in the house, smashed some crockery and a few doors. Police
born 1975, is an English comedian, actor, musician and writer currently living in Los Angeles. lee: street dance group that participated in the television show Britain’s GOI Talent. the silver jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II in 1977.
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were called, tapes were edited and the carnival rolled on. When I was warned to be discreet on-air about the extent ofthe violence, I quoted a British first-world-war general who, reflecting on the inability of his returning troops to adapt to civilian life, said: “You 20 cannot rouse the animal in man then expect it to be put aside at a moment’s notice.” “Yeah, that’s exactly the kind of thing we want you to say the opposite of,” said the channel’s representative. This week’s riots are sad and frightening and, if I have by virtue of my temporary displacement forgone the right to speak about the behaviour of my countrymen, then 1 25 this is gonna be irksome. I mean even David Cameron came back from his holiday. Eventually. The Tuscan truffles lost their succulence when the breaking glass became too loud to ignore. Then dopey 01′ Boris2 came cycling back into the London clutter with his spun gold hair and his spun shit logic as it became apparent that the holiday was over. In fact, it isn’t my absence from the territory of London that bothers me; it’s my 30 absence from the economic class that is being affected that itches in my gut because, as I looked at the online incident maps, the boroughs that were suffering all, for me, had some resonance. I’ve lived in Dalston, Hackney, Elephant, Camden and Bethnal Green. I grew up round Dagenham and Romford and, whilst I could never claim to be from the demographic most obviously affected, I feel guilty that I’m not there now. 35 I feel proud to be English, proud to be a Londoner (all right, an Essex boy), never more so than since being in exile, and I naturally began to wonder what would make young people destroy their communities. I have spoken to mates in London and Manchester and they sound genuinely frightened and hopeless, and the details of their stories place this outbreak beyond the realms of any ‘” political idealism or rationalisation. But I can’t, from my ivory tower in the Hollywood Hills, compete with the understandable yet futile rhetoric, describing the rioters as mindless. Nor do I want to dwell on the sadness of our beautiful cities being tarnished and people’s shops and livelihoods, sometimes generations old, being immolated. The tragic and inevitable deaths ought to be left for eulogies and grieving. Tariq Jahan 3 has ” spoken so eloquently from his position of painful proximity, with such compassion, that nearly all else is redundant. The only question I can legitimately ask is: why is this happening? Mark Duggan’s4 death has been badly handled but no one is contesting that is a reason for these conflagrations beyond the initial flash of activity in Tottenham. I’ve heard Theresa May’ 6 50 and the Old Etonians whose hols have been curtailed (many would say they’re the real victims) saying the behaviour is “unjustifiable” and “unacceptable”. Wow! Thanks guys! What a wonderful use of the planet’s fast-depleting oxygen resources. Now that’s been dealt with can we move on to more taxing matters such as whether or not Jack The Ripper was a ladies’ man. And what the hell do bears get up to in those woods?
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Prime M inister David Cameron was criticised for not breaking off his holiday in Tuscany in Italy sooner when riots broke out in London in August 2011 . Boris Johnson, Mayor of London. the father of a young man who was killed in the riots . the young man whose death in police custody led to the first riots . Home Secretary (indenrigsminister) .
holidays.
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However “unacceptable” and “unjustifiable” it might be, it has happened so we better accept it and, whilst we can’t justify it, we should kick around a few neurons and work out why so many people feel utterly disconnected from the cities they live in. Unless on the news tomorrow it’s revealed that there’s been a freaky “criminal creating” chemical leak in London and Manchester and Liverpool and Birmingham that’s causing young people to spontaneously and simultaneously violate their environments – in which case we can park the 01′ brainboxes, stop worrying and get on with the football season, but I suspect there hasn’t – we have, as human beings, got a few things to consider together. I should here admit that I have been arrested for criminal damage for my part in anticapitalist protest earlier in this decade. I often attended protests and then, in my early 20s, and on drugs, I enjoyed it when the protests lost direction and became chaotic, hosti le even. I was intrigued by the anarchist “Black bloc”, hooded and masked, as, in retrospect, was their agenda, but was more viscerally affected by the football “casuals” who’d turn up because the veneer of the protest’s idealistic objective gave them the perfect opportunity to wreck stuff and have a row with the Old Bill’. That was never my cup of tea though. For one thing, policemen are generally pretty good fighters and second, it registered that the accent they shouted at me with was closer to my own than that of some of those singing about the red flag making the wall of plastic shields between us seem thinner. I found those protests exciting, yes, because I was young and a bit of a twerp but also, I suppose, because there was a void in me. A lack of direction, a sense that I was not invested in the dominant culture, that government existed not to look after the interests of the people it was elected to represent but the big businesses that they were in bed with. I felt that, and I had a mum who loved me, a dad who told me that nothing was beyond my reach, an education, a grant from Essex council (to train as an actor of all things!!!) and several charities that gave me money for maintenance. I shudder to think how disenfranchised I would have felt if! had been deprived ofthat long list of privileges. That state of deprivation though is, of course, the condition that many of those rioting endure as their unbending reality. No education, a weakened family unit, no money and no way of getting any. JD Sports2 is probably easier to desecrate if you can’t afford what’s in there and the few poorly paid jobs there are taken. Amidst the bleakness of this social landscape, squinting all the while in the glare of a culture that radiates ultraviolet consumerism and infrared celebrity. That daily, hourly, incessantly enforces the egregious, deceitful message that you are what you wear, what you drive, what you watch and what you watch it on, in livid, neon pixels. The only light in their lives comes from these luminous corporate messages. No wonder they have their fucking hoods up. I remember Cameron saying “hug a hoodie”3 but I haven’t seen him doing it. Why would he? Hoodies don’t vote, they’ve realised it’s pointless, that whoever gets elected will just be a different shade of the “we don’t give a toss about you” party.
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(slang) the police.
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