"The masses are feeble-minded like an idiot. They have always been exploited and always will be exploited. Why? Because they have not enough wit to distinguish between their own original feeling and the feeling diddled into existence by the exploiter."

• You are comparing texts in order to explore them in

relation to their contexts. It develops understanding

of the effects of context and questions of value. You

examine ways in which social, cultural and historical

context influences aspects of texts, or the ways in

which changes in context lead to changed values being

reflected in texts.

• This includes study and use of the language of texts,

consideration of purposes and audiences, and analysis

of the content, values and attitudes conveyed through

a range of readings.

Comparative Study of Texts and Contexts

In your answer you will be assessed on how well you:

•demonstrate understanding of the meanings of a pair of

texts when considered together

•evaluate the relationships between texts and contexts

•organise, develop and express ideas using language

appropriate to audience, purpose and form

Comparative Study of Texts and Contexts

Social Context - PlaceSo that the life was a curious cross between industrialism and the old agricultural England of Shakespeare and Milton, and Fielding and George Eliot. The dialect was broad Derbyshire, and always 'thee' and 'thou'. The people lived almost entirely by instinct, men of my father's age could not really read. And the pit did not mechanize men. On the contrary. Under the butty system, the miners worked underground as a sort of intimate community, they knew each other practically naked, and with curious close intimacy, and the darkness and the underground remoteness of the pit 'stall' and the continual presence of danger, made the physical, instinctive, and intuitional contact between men very highly developed, a contact almost as close as touch, very real and very powerful. This physical awareness and intimate togetherness was at its strongest down pit. When the men came up into the light, they blinked. They had, in a measure, to change their flow. Nevertheless, they brought with them above ground the curious dark intimacy of the mine, the naked sort of contact, and if I think of my childhood, it is always as if there was a lustrous sort of inner darkness, like the gloss of coal, in which we moved and had our real being. My father loved the pit. He was hurt badly, more than once, but he would never stay away. He loved the contact, the intimacy, as men in the war loved the intense male comradeship of the dark days. They did not know what they had lost till they lost it. And I think it is the same with the young colliers of to-day.

The Miner•no daytime ambition•no daytime intellect - unable to read•not preoccupied with the rational aspect of life•took life instinctively and intuitively•spent few hours each day in the daylight•he was happy; he was fulfilled on the receptive side, not on the expressive•collier drank with his mates•intimacy with his mates•looked to escape the home

The Wife

• nagging materialism

• sought only facts

• cold ugliness

• nagging materialism

• sons “got on”

• man's business to provide

• concerned with “show”

Now though perhaps nobody knew it, it was

ugliness which betrayed the spirit of man, in

the nineteenth century. The great crime which

the moneyed classes and promoters of industry

committed in the palmy Victorian days was the

condemning of the workers to ugliness, ugliness,

ugliness: meanness and formless and ugly

surroundings, ugly ideals, ugly religion, ugly

hope, ugly love, ugly clothes, ugly furniture,

ugly houses, ugly relationship between workers

and employers. The human soul needs actual

beauty even more than bread.

Social Context - Place

Free Will and Determinism

Do you believe that all our behaviours are causally determined… by the laws of nature ... of situations ... upbringing?

Free Will and Determinism

A hard determinist believes that all our behaviours are causally determined - none of them is free

A soft determinists believes that, even if all our behaviours are causally determined, we still exercise choice in choosing to use them

Soft determinists are called compatibilists because they believe free will and determinism are NOT mutually exclusive.

Cultural Context - Philosophy