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Introduction to Module B: Critical Study of Texts

This module requires students to explore and evaluate a specific text and its reception in a range of contexts. It develops students’ understanding of questions of textual integrity.

(Reread English Stage 6 Syllabus , p 52)

Students choose one text from one of the listed types of text.

Shakespeare

Students who choose the Shakespeare play explore its literary qualities and the ways in which different readings are possible and imply different values that may be realised through different productions.

· Shakespeare, William, The Tragedy of King Lear, Cambridge University Press, New Cambridge Shakespeare, 1992, ISBN 0521337291

Prose Fiction

Students choose one of the following texts, explore its literary qualities and different readings of the text, and reflect on the values implied by these readings.

· Ondaatje, Michael, In the Skin of a Lion, Picador, 1988, ISBN 0330301837

· Bronte, Emily, Wuthering Heights, Penguin Classics, 1996, ISBN 0140434186

· Winton, Tim, Cloudstreet, Penguin, 1998, ISBN 0140273980

Drama or Film

Students choose one of the following texts and explore the ways in which it represents ideas. Students explore the distinctive qualities of the text and the ways in which values may be realised through production.

Drama

· Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, ‘The School for Scandal’ in The School for Scandal and Other Plays, Penguin Classics, 1989, ISBN 014043240X

Film

· Welles, Orson, Citizen Kane, CEL, 1941

Poetry

Students choose one of the following poets for study. They explore the distinctive qualities of each poem in the prescribed selection, the ways these poems reflect the poet’s concerns and literary style and the values implied in different readings of the poetry.

· Harwood, Gwen, Selected Poems: A New Edition, Penguin Books, 2001, ISBN 0141006684

‘Alter Ego’, ‘The Glass Jar’, ‘At Mornington’, ‘Prize-Giving’, ‘Father and Child (Parts I & II)’, ‘The Violets’

· Yeats, William Butler, W B Yeats: Poems selected by Seamus Heaney, Faber and Faber, 2000, ISBN 0571203787

‘When You Are Old’, ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’, ‘Easter 1916’, ‘The Second Coming’, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’, ‘Byzantium’

Nonfiction, Media or Multimedia

Speeches

Students who choose to study the speeches explore the ways ideas are articulated in the prescribed texts. They explore the distinctive qualities of each of the speeches and the ways different audiences shape meaning. Students reflect on the values implied in different responses and in rhetoric itself.

Board of Studies website:

Socrates – ‘No evil can happen’, 399 BC; Cicero – ‘Among us you can dwell no longer’, 63BC; Abraham Lincoln – ‘Government of the people, by the people, for the people’, 1863; Emma Goldman – ‘The political criminal of today must needs be a saint of the new age’, 1917; Martin Luther King – ‘I have a dream’, 1963; Denise Levertov – ‘Statement for a Television Program’, 1972; Margaret Atwood – ‘Spotty-Handed Villainesses’, 1994; Vaclav Havel – ‘A Contaminated Moral Environment’, 1990; Paul Keating – ‘Funeral Service of the Unknown Australian Soldier’, 1993; Noel Pearson – ‘An Australian history for us all’, 1996; Aung San Suu Kyi – ‘Keynote Address at the Beijing World Conference on Women’ 1995; Mary McAleese – ‘The Defence of Freedom’, 1998.

(Note the amendments made to this list outlined in the Board Bulletin

February 2002, Vol 11 No 1)

BOS 07/02

English Stage 6 – Area of Study, Electives and Texts for the HSC

The Board wishes to advise that some minor corrections

are required to English Stage 6 Prescriptions: Area of Study,

Electives and Texts for the Higher School Certificate 2001–3.

Details are provided below.

Schools should note that the website version of English

Stage 6 Prescriptions: Area of Study, Electives and Texts for the

Higher School Certificate 2001–2003 has been reviewed.

………

The Board also wishes to advise that a correction is

required to the support document English Stage 6

Speeches HSC English (Advanced) Module B: Critical Study

of Texts, Nonfiction, Media or Multimedia. Details are

provided below.

p 56

Remove final paragraph from ‘Those of us who believe

that words can hurt ……more theoretical than actual.’

This paragraph is repeated from p 55.

The final paragraph should end ‘you are free to speak, but you

will never have the last word.’

Multimedia

Students choose one of the following multimedia texts and explore the ways in which ideas are represented in the text. Students reflect on the significance and effect of its changing form and substance. They identify and question the effects of devices that define the borders and the paths through texts and consider how these shape meaning.

· ATSIC website:

The sections of the site set for study are:

About ATSIC
ATSIC Service Charter
Events: NAIDOC section
Newsroom
Issues.

In the year before the commencement of the HSC course, final details of the site sections will be given. This information will be published in the July edition of the Board Bulletin.

· Larsen, Deena, Samplers: Nine Vicious Little Hypertexts (for Macintosh or Windows) Eastgate Systems Inc , 1998

Nonfiction

Students who choose the nonfiction text explore the ways ideas are expressed in the prescribed text and its historical and cultural contexts. Students consider different readings of the text and the values implied by those readings.

· Chang, Jung, Wild Swans, Flamingo, 1992, ISBN 0006374921

Specific editions of the set texts are listed. Schools, however, may use any suitable edition of the text selected, if the specified edition is unavailable. Where a text is quoted in an examination it will be from the listed edition.