IB Literature SL case studies
IB Literature SL · Put your knowledge to work in context.
IB Literature SL is the Standard Level component of the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme's studies in language and literature. It is designed for students aged roughly 16 to 19 in IB World Schools, and it is also taken by candidates seeking a standalone subject certificate. The IB Literature SL case studies are 5 cases and about 4,413 words.
1The author's intention is not the text's meaning: revising an individual oral
Amara is three weeks from recording her individual oral. She has settled on the global issue 'the pressure to conform in small communities' and two extracts: 45 lines from a mid-century novel in which a character announces, 'I cannot be what this town wants,' and 30 lines from a contemporary play in which the chorus repeats, 'we do what is done.' In her first timed practice she spent three and a half minutes retelling both plots, then argued that the two writers 'wanted to show that conformity is destructive,' supporting this with quotations from published author interviews she found online.
963 words, about 5 min2Context as wallpaper: a Paper 2 comparison that has facts but no argument
Diego's mock Paper 2, written in one hour and forty-five minutes, compares a nineteenth-century Russian novella with a twenty-first-century Canadian novel on the topic 'how place shapes what characters can do.' His opening paragraph of about 150 words lists facts: the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, St Petersburg's population growth, and the author's own training as an engineer. Paragraph two summarises both plots in chronological order.
904 words, about 5 min3One snow-filled well is not an allusion: intertextual claims on an unseen text
Paper 1 practice: an unseen extract of about 40 lines, translated from Japanese in 2019, describes a woman watching snow fall into an abandoned well. Priya has recently studied classical Japanese poetry in translation.
832 words, about 4 min4Whose sentences are these? Style claims in a translated work
Nadia is comparing two works for Paper 2: a novel translated from Portuguese and a play written originally in English. In her draft she argues that the novelist's 'signature style' is 'lean, declarative sentences that refuse emotion,' and she quotes a five-word paragraph as proof.
850 words, about 4 min5Refusing to compare: difference as a reason and as material
Planning Paper 2, Sam has two works: a 1930s Bengali novel about a household divided by partition-era politics, and a 2005 Australian novel about a family renovating a suburban house. He wants the topic 'the house as a site of confinement.' In the planning session he argues that comparing them would be 'inauthentic' because the Bengali novel is postcolonial and the Australian one is not, and that applying the same frame to both would flatten their difference.
864 words, about 4 min