The Tense Is Never Innocent
Grammar: Literary tenses + Historic present + Would for pas
A Level 6 English lesson exploring art.
What's in this lesson
A Level 6 (proficiency) ESL lesson on art, practising literary tenses + historic present + would for pas. The worksheet has a reading, target vocabulary, a grammar reference with practice and discussion questions.
From the reading: The Tense Is Never Innocent
Picture the moment a novelist sits before a blank page and reaches, before character or plot or scene, for a tense. The choice is made so quickly that most writers cannot explain it afterwards — and yet it is, arguably, the most ideologically loaded decision in the entire enterprise of prose fiction. Hilary Mantel, who opens Wolf Hall in the insistent, unrelenting historic present — Thomas Cromwell is sitting, he watches, he waits — does not do so for variety or pace alone. She does so because the present tense is a theory: that the past is not settled, that history is still happening to somebody, that power is always in the room. Her prose architecture, built tense by tense, is a worldview.
Vocabulary
- prose architecture
- worldview
- would
- tense ideology
- rhetorical precision
- metalinguistic awareness
- worldviews
- synthesis
Grammar
- Historic present
- Cromwell enters the room and surveys his enemies. — urgency; past events made immediate
- Habitual 'would'
- Every evening he would walk to the harbour and watch the light fail. — recurring past; elegiac tone
Discussion questions
- Would you rather read a novel in present or past tense?
- Historic present or habitual 'would' — which carries more emotional weight?
- Is Orwell's plain style a virtue or a limitation?
The Tense Is Never Innocent
Grammar: Literary tenses + Historic present + Would for pas
What's in this lesson:
Full lesson plan with reading, grammar, vocabulary, and discussion.
Sign up to access full lesson plans
Start with a free trial — 5 lesson generations included
Get Started Free