Assessment Objective Three
Here
The Large Cool Store
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 Overview of Assessment Objective three
 i. Comparing ideas, attitudes and themes
- exemplar paragraph comparing ideas
 ii. Comparing language, structure and form
- exemplar paragraph comparing language
 iii. alternative interpretations based on own judgments
- Exemplar alternative reading paragraph
 iv alternative interpretations informed by critical theory
- Exemplar alternative reading using literary theory
 v. using critical views
- critical views relating to ‘Here’
- exemplar alternative reading using criticism
overview
Assessment Objective Three
AO3 has two main elements. The first tests your ability to compare
texts, exploring differences and similarities in meaning and style.
The second aims to assess how well you engage with other
readings of the text in your overall argument.
There are two main aspects of a good comparison:
i. the ideas, themes and attitudes in the texts
ii. the style or methods of presentation - language, structure, form
There are three ways to construct other readings:
iii. construct alternative readings of your own
iv. use theoretical models and approaches e.g. feminism, Marxism
v. responding to critical opinions about the text by academics,
teachers or professional writers
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i. comparing ideas, attitudes and themes
Here
The Large Cool Store
• The speaker shows disgust
towards contemporary
society and searches for his
freedom
• The speaker looks down on
people who try to find
meaning in material
possessions
• Consumerism takes people
away from their dull
existence and fills them with
desire for a better life
• Modern advertising and
department stores create the
illusions that ordinary people
can escape their drab lives
• There is an intense
loneliness and sadness in
modern society, resulting in
humans becoming isolated
and detached
• In modern society human
relationships are perverted
with people separated from
each other and dehumanised
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exemplar paragraph comparing ideas
Both poems show speakers who look down on the attitudes and
behaviour of other people in society. In ‘Here’ the persona expresses
disgust towards the ‘cut-price crowd’ who ‘push through plate-glass
swing doors’ to ‘their desires’. He wants to escape the endless
bombardment of ‘cheap suits, red kitchen-ware, sharp shoes’ and to
find the freedom of ‘unfenced existence’. In a similar way, the voice
of ‘The Large Cool Store’ scorns the ‘sort’ ‘from low terraced houses’
who head towards the department stores at the weekend hoping to
‘share’ the ‘world’ represented by the glamour of Modes at Night.
Whilst the speaker in ‘Here’ wants to escape this consumer culture,
the persona of ‘The Large Cool Store’ appears resigned to being part
of a society of ‘unreal wishes’ where people are ‘synthetic, new, / and
natureless ecstasies.’
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Practice
Activity one: write a paragraph comparing the ideas
and attitudes in ‘Mr Bleaney’ and ‘Talking in Bed’.
ii. comparing language, structure and form
Here
The Large Cool Store
• The language is quotidian,
• The language is largely
with an absence of adjectives
monosyllable with the listing
in the cataloguing of
of different colours used to
consumer goods on sale
contrast dreams with realities
• The structure of the poem
marks the stages of a
journey away from society
towards a freedom and
isolation still just out of reach
• The structure of the poem
builds like an argument
where the final stanza makes
a poetic judgment on the
impact of advertising on lives
• The four stanza largely
• The form of this lyrical poem
iambic pentameter form with
combines the mundane
regular alternate rhyme helps
details of everyday existence
create sense of a steady,
with more tender, poetic
unending search for freedom
reflections
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exemplar paragraph comparing language
The language Larkin uses in both poems to describe the goods on
sale in modern consumer culture is simple, plain and quotidian. In
‘Here’ the everyday language describes the overwhelming range of
‘desires’ that lie behind the ‘plate-glass swing doors’ of the stores.
Larkin catalogues the ‘eclectic mixers, toasters, washers, driers’,
where the absence of adjectives reflects the dehumanising effect of
choice on individual identity. In comparison, the language used in
‘The Large Cool Store’ is even more simplistic, with predominately
monosyllabic words used to evoke the look and feel of department
stores. Larkin uses the contrast in colours between the ‘browns and
greys’ of weekday clothes and the more glamorous ‘lemon,
sapphire, moss-green’ of the nightwear to show how advertising
creates the illusion people can escape their drab lives in these
‘unreal wishes’.
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Practice
Activity two: write a paragraph comparing the methods
of presentation in ‘Mr Bleaney’ and ‘Talking in Bed’.
iii. alternative interpretations based on own judgments
How to form an alternative reading of your own
English literature depends a great on interpretation: readers from
different periods with different backgrounds are unlikely to read the
meaning or meanings in a text in exactly the same way. Likewise, most
texts invite readers to form their own judgments, particularly in relation
to ideas and themes where there is no clear moral position.
• Check mark scheme to see if alternative interpretations required
• Aim to give 2-3 alternative readings in an essay
• Choose significant alternative readings e.g. in Larkin’s poems closing
lines are often ambiguous, inviting alternative (contradictory) readings
• Engage with the alternative reading in your argument
• Use subordinating conjunctions to frame your alternative reading
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Exemplar alternative reading paragraph
Alternative
reading
Own
opinion
At the end of ‘The Large Cool Store’ the speaker
draws back from describing the clothes on
Subordinating
display to consider the wider impact of
conjunction
advertising on human life. Whilst it initially
appears Larkin is accusing women of being
‘natureless in their ecstasies’, since they are the
ones who think ‘Bri-Nylon Baby Dolls and
shorties’ offer them the chance of a more
glamorous life, Larkin’s real target lies elsewhere.
The closing lines really critique the men whose
‘young unreal wishes’ create female desire, or
rather the consumer culture itself which feeds of Use
it to make money. In this way, the poem is not
alternative
reading in
misogynistic as women are ultimately victims.
argument
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Practice
Activity three: write a paragraph about ‘Mr Bleaney’
that takes into account an alternative reading.
iv alternative interpretations informed by critical theory
• Post colonial readings are interested in how colonial countries and
people are represented in texts by Western writers. They explore the
ways in which postcolonial writers write about their own identity.
• Feminist readings believe ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ are constructed
by culture. They are interested in how women represented in texts
written by men, and how texts display power relations between sexes.
• Psychoanalytical readings are interested in the unconscious, and
pay close attention to what is glossed over or ‘repressed’. They look
beyond obvious surface meaning to what the text is ‘really’ about.
• Marxist readings look at other relevant historical texts, alongside
literary ones, in order to see more clearly the context in which the
literature was produced, and to recover its history. They look at how
class differences are established and reinforced in texts.
• Structurualist and post-structuralist readings are not interested in
when a text was written, who it was written by, or what it is about.
They believe we use language to construct our world. They are most
interested in how the text is constructed: its form, its structure and the
patterns of language in it, especially pairs of opposites.
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exemplar alternative reading using literary theory
‘The Large Cool Store’ highlights the way shops rely on images of
women and femininity to sell their products and fuel consumer
desire. Larkin describes the underwear on the stands of Modes of
Night as ‘thin as blouses’ and the way the different items ‘flounce
in clusters’. The simile creates the impression that both the
clothes and the women who buy them are fragile and
unsubstantial. Likewise, the choice of the verb ‘flounce’ compares
flirtatious female behaviour with the way the clothes try to attract
the attention of customers. A feminist reading would criticise the
way Larkin’s draws upon images female sexuality to consider how
consumerism operates and suggest that the poem reinforces
ideas of women as objects used by men for men. This type of
reading would most probably consider Larkin to be a misogynist.
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Practice
Activity four: write a paragraph about ‘Mr Bleaney’ that
uses a theoretical approach to support a point made.
v. using critical views
Critical views
Most of the texts that are studied at A Level have been written about
extensively over the years by a number of different types of
professional writers, such as academics, teachers, reviewers and the
authors themselves. Much of what we know about texts, particularly
older plays, novels and poems, comes from other people’s research,
analysis and ideas. We refer to this writing as criticism and these
critical views can be very useful in helping to develop our own ideas.
Most criticism falls into two main categories
a) ideas and opinions about the specific text
b) ideas and opinions about the writer and their writing in general
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critical views relating to ‘Here’
• From beginning to end the poem is a restless quest across country,
never stopping for breath until it reaches the sea. Life, the poet is aware,
is an ever-moving point of consciousness; we have nothing else.
James Booth
• At the close the poet finds the more sublime detachment at which he
has been aiming.
James Booth
• On his journeys the poet is tortured by anxieties about potential contact
between his exiled, observant persona, and the communities from which
he is sealed away.
Nicholas Marsh
• Larkin frequently embraces linguistic strangeness, self-conscious
literariness, radical self-questioning, sudden shifts of voice and register,
complex viewpoints and perspectives, and symbolist intensity.
Stephen Regan
• Sweeping like a camera in a helicopter over the ‘widening river’s slow
presence’ towards the‘surprise of a large town, he lingers over the
clutter of civic detail before veering on again to the country between Hull
and the coast, where he plunges into solitude.
Andrew Motion
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exemplar alternative reading using criticism
‘Here’ depicts a lonely figure desperate to escape the noise and
emptiness of modern life. The speaker is on a quest for freedom,
‘swerving east, from rich industrial shadows’ through the centre of
Hull towards the Holderness Peninsula that faces the North Sea
where ‘silence stands / like heat’ and he can experience the thrill of
‘unfenced existence’. His restless desire to get away from others is
displayed in his reliance on the verb ‘swerving’, which in the first
stanza is repeated three times at the start of lines or of after strong
pauses to recreate the sense of perpetual motion and avoidance.
James Booth explains how at the end of the poem ‘the poet finds
the more sublime detachment at which he has been aiming.’ It
seems that the voice in the poem is looking for some kind of
spiritual escape from modern society, where he can be truly free.
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critical views relating to ‘The Large Cool Store’
• Larkin's objects to the hypocrisies of conventional sexual politics that
hamper the lives of both sexes in equal measure.
Stephen Cooper
• His fury against women is not so much a declared state of siege
against them personally as it is an internal battle raging within himself.
Janice Rossen
• To call Larkin a misogynist would be an overstatement – to call him a
misanthropist might be closer to the mark.
Janice Rossen
• The argument is whether the shoppers are deluding themselves when
they buy something…or are they going beyond the limits which society
sets for them?
Andrew Motion
• There is a sense of contradiction in the middle of the poem in that what
lies furthest from us - for instance the brightly coloured shop – is
somehow going to tell us how the poem will end.
Andrew Motion
• Larkin sees drab houses, drab colours, drab lives and drab people
during the week trying to change by night into something they are not.
Andrew Motion
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Practice
Activity five: write a paragraph about ‘Mr Bleaney’ that
uses one or two critical views to support a point.
Practise
Activity six: Write a comparison of the ways ideas of
isolation are presented in Mr Bleaney and Talking in Bed.
Remember to:
 Compare the ideas, attitudes and feelings
 Compare the methods of presentation
 Show awareness of different readings:
- your own alternative interpretation
- critical views
- theoretical frameworks