IB Diploma Programme Language A: Literature – Time and space Study Guide

This guide teaches Time and space, the second of the three areas of exploration in IB Diploma Programme Language A: Literature. It is aligned to the IB Diploma Programme Subject Brief, Language A: literature, which lists Time and space in the curriculum model with 50 recommended teaching hours at SL and 80 at HL. The area is studied at both levels. It follows the current IB subject brief (first assessments for SL and HL 2021).

Use it with the Time and space revision notes and the Time and space practice questions. Course links: Language A: Literature hub · printable checklist. For the course as a whole, see the syllabus guide and the subject guide.

What this unit covers

Part of the area	What you must be able to do	SL/HL
Context of production	Explain how the time, place and culture a work was written in shaped the writer’s choices	SL and HL
Context of reception	Explain how readers in different times and places have read, or could read, the same work differently	SL and HL
Works in translation	Read a translated work with care: know what translation can change and base claims on what survives it	SL and HL
Cultural perspectives	Show how a work reflects, questions or shapes the beliefs of its culture, and how your own culture shapes your reading	SL and HL

The brief states the aim behind all four rows. The course asks you to consider your own interpretations “as well as the critical perspectives of others”, and to explore “how such positions are shaped by cultural belief systems”. Assessment objective 1 names “contexts in which texts are written and/or received”. That phrase is the core of this unit.

This unit is not about memorising history. It is about linking a fact of context to a choice in the text, and then to an effect on meaning.

Context of production: how a work reflects its time and place

A work’s context of production is the set of conditions it was written in: period, place, language, politics, beliefs, the writer’s own position, and the literary conventions available. Every work reflects some of these. Many also try to shape them, by challenging a belief or giving a voice to people the culture ignored.

Keep two ideas apart:

• Setting is the time and place inside the work (where and when events happen).
• Context is the time and place around the work (when, where and for whom it was written).

A novel written in 1900 about the year 1800 has a setting of 1800 and a context of production of 1900. Both matter, and the gap between them is often the point.

Worked example: Shelley, “Ozymandias” (1818)

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s sonnet describes a ruined statue in the desert. On its pedestal the king’s words survive: “Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” The next words are the traveller’s, who reports the scene: “Nothing beside remains.”

Step 1 – the choice. Shelley places the king’s boast directly before a blunt, three-word statement. The boast looks forward in time; the reply looks at what time has done.

Step 2 – the effect. The juxtaposition turns the boast against itself. The “Mighty” should despair, but not for the reason the king meant: not because his works are too great, but because even great works vanish.

Step 3 – the context. Shelley was a radical writer, hostile to tyranny, writing in a Europe of kings and empires. A reader of 1818 could apply the lesson to living rulers, not only to an ancient one.

Step 4 – the reception. A reader now may read the poem as a comment on any monument or empire, including ones that did not exist in 1818. The poem’s closing image, “The lone and level sands stretch far away”, lets each age supply its own ruler.

Notice the order: text first, then context, then effect. Context is used to explain a choice, never dropped in as a paragraph of history.

Space: place as meaning

“Space” covers place: a country, a city, a room, a border. A place in literature is rarely neutral. It carries the values of the culture that built it and of the writer who describes it.

Worked example: Wordsworth, “Composed upon Westminster Bridge” (written 1802, published 1807)

Wordsworth’s sonnet opens: “Earth has not any thing to shew more fair”. He describes London at dawn: “Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie / Open unto the fields, and to the sky”.

• Choice: a list of buildings joined to “the fields” and “the sky”.
• Effect: the city seems part of nature, calm and whole. Later the poet says “the very houses seem asleep”.
• Context: the poem catches the city at the one hour when its crowds and trade are absent. The stillness is the surprise.
• Reading across space: set this beside a poem that shows the same city full of poverty at street level and you see that “London” is not one place in literature. It is what each writer’s position lets them see. The practice set gives you such a poem to work on.

Reading works in translation

Many works you study in this course were written in another language. The brief makes this part of assessment: the individual oral is a “prepared oral response” on how “one work originally written in the language studied and one work studied in translation” approach a common global issue.

A translation is a new text made by a second writer, the translator, who makes choices at every line. Some things travel well; some do not.

Usually survives translation	Often changes in translation
Plot, structure and order of events	Sound: rhyme, rhythm, puns, alliteration
Point of view and narrative voice (broadly)	Register, dialect and forms of address
Major images and symbols	Single word choices and their connotations
Characters’ actions and choices	Culture-specific words with no direct equivalent

Worked example: a title in translation

Anton Chekhov’s story of 1899 appears in English as The Lady with the Dog and as The Lady with the Little Dog. The Russian title uses a diminutive form of the word for dog. The longer English title keeps the smallness and the slightly fond tone; the shorter one is neater but loses it. Neither is wrong. Each translator made a choice.

Henrik Ibsen’s Et dukkehjem (1879) is known as A Doll’s House in most British editions and as A Doll House in some American ones. The second version stresses the whole household as a toy, not only the doll who lives in it.

What this means for you:

1. Name your translator and edition when you write about a translated work.
2. Build arguments on what survives: structure, events, images, point of view.
3. Be careful with claims about a single word’s sound or connotation. Phrase them as claims about the translation (“in this translation, the word … suggests”).
4. Treat the translator’s choices as evidence too. A translator’s note often shows what the original does that English cannot.

Cultural perspectives and reception

The brief’s aims ask you to understand “relationships between texts and a variety of perspectives, cultural contexts, and local and global issues”, and how these “contribute to diverse responses and open up multiple meanings”. In practice this means three questions:

1. What did the work’s first readers expect? Their beliefs set what felt normal, shocking or funny.
2. How has reception changed? Later readers bring new questions to the same words.
3. Where do you stand? Your own time and place shape your reading too. Say so when it matters.

Worked example: A Doll’s House and its ending

At the end of Ibsen’s play, Nora leaves her husband and children. For an early German production, Ibsen reluctantly wrote an alternative ending in which Nora stays for the children. That fact is evidence of reception: some theatres and audiences of the time found the original ending unacceptable.

A modern audience in many countries may find Nora’s exit less shocking and more inevitable. The words have not changed. The context of reception has.

An answer that uses this well does not stop at the fact. It links it to the play: “The final exchange makes Nora’s reasons clear and calm. That calm made the ending harder, not easier, for its first audiences, because she leaves not in panic but by choice.”

Worked example: a reading that changes with time

Shakespeare’s The Tempest (first performed around 1611) has an island ruled by an outsider, Prospero, who controls its earlier inhabitant, Caliban. Later readers and writers have read the play in the light of European colonial history, and some have rewritten it from Caliban’s side. You do not need to accept this reading. You do need to see that the play supports several readings depending on where the reader stands. That is what “open up multiple meanings” looks like.

How this unit feeds assessment

The brief does not tie one area of exploration to one paper. It lists four components, and Time and space skills appear in all of them:

• Paper 1 (guided analysis of unseen literary passage/passages; 1.25 hours SL, 2.25 hours HL; 35%). You may be told little or nothing about the context. Infer time and place from the text itself: vocabulary, objects, social rules, forms of address. Offer these inferences with care.
• Paper 2 (comparative essay on two literary works, one of four questions; 1.75 hours; 35% SL, 25% HL). Context of production and reception can explain why two works treat the same concern differently.
• Individual oral (30% SL, 20% HL). One work must be a work studied in translation, so the skills in the translation section above apply directly.
• HL essay (HL only; 1,200–1,500 words on one work studied; 20%). A focused line of inquiry about a work’s context, or about a translation choice, can give the essay a clear argument.

Your teacher will share the assessment criteria for each component. For exam technique, see exam preparation and the assessment revision notes.

How this unit links to the other two areas

• Readers, writers and texts gives you close reading of technique. Time and space adds the question: why this technique, here and then?
• Intertextuality: connecting texts asks how works respond to each other. Context often explains why a later work answers an earlier one as it does.

Common errors

• The history paragraph. A block of background facts with no link to a line or choice in the work.
• Setting confused with context. Saying a novel “reflects the 1800s” because it is set then, when it was written a century later.
• One culture for everyone. Writing “people in the past believed…” as if a whole period thought alike. Name whose beliefs you mean.
• Judging the past by today only. Calling a character “sexist” or “backward” and stopping there. Explain what the work shows about its own culture, then how a reader now responds.
• Over-reading a translated word. Building a whole paragraph on the sound of one English word in a translated novel.
• Ignoring your own position. Never admitting that your reading comes from your own time and place.
• Guessing context in Paper 1. Stating a precise date or country for an unseen passage the text does not support.

Next steps

Condense this guide with the revision notes, then test yourself with the practice questions, which include passages to analyse and an individual oral plan.

Official syllabus

International Baccalaureate Organization, Diploma Programme Subject Brief, Language A: literature, first assessments for SL and HL 2021 (2019). Literary quotations are from public-domain works: Shelley (1818; quoted from the 1819 text) and Wordsworth (1807).