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Module B: Critical Study of Literature
Quick questions on Distinctive qualities and voice in HSC English Advanced Module B
15short Q&A pairs drawn directly from our worked dot-point answer. For full context and worked exam questions, read the parent dot-point page.
What is voice?Show answer
Voice is the distinctive sound of the text. It is not the same as point of view (the position from which the text is told) or character (the figure represented), although both contribute to voice.
What is distinctiveness through voice?Show answer
The strongest Module B paragraphs argue distinctiveness through voice. The text is distinctive because of how it sounds, and how it sounds is a function of specific linguistic choices that other texts in the tradition did not make.
What are reading voice in passages?Show answer
A discipline that helps when writing about voice. Choose three passages, each short, each carrying the voice in a different mood. Read them side by side. Identify the features that persist across all three (those are the voice signature).
What is a structural choice that the tradition did not require?Show answer
Hamlet's interiorising soliloquies inside a revenge tragedy framework. The non-linear chronology of The Great Gatsby inside the realist novel tradition. The first-person past-tense narration of The Handmaid's Tale inside the dystopian genre.
What is a representational choice that the genre's other texts evade?Show answer
Macbeth treats interior moral collapse with a directness most Jacobean tragedies do not. The Crucible treats false accusation with a procedural precision most American mid-century plays do not. The text's distinctiveness is in what it is willing to look at.
What is a voice that the tradition did not anticipate?Show answer
The narrator of 1984 holds an analytical voice inside a novel that depicts the destruction of analytical thought. The voice itself is distinctive.
What is diction and register?Show answer
The vocabulary the text reaches for. Latinate or Anglo-Saxon, abstract or concrete, technical or colloquial, formal or informal. The register choice is the first move of voice construction.
What is syntax and rhythm?Show answer
Sentence length, clause structure, line breaks, the relation between sentence and breath. Hemingway's voice is largely a syntactic decision. Shakespeare's voice is partly a rhythmic decision.
What is imagery and reference?Show answer
What the voice reaches for when it needs an image. A voice that reaches for biological imagery is different from one that reaches for legal imagery. The imagery field is voice work.
What is point of view and distance?Show answer
First or third, retrospective or present, omniscient or limited, close or distant. The angle of access is part of the voice.
What is the intimate relationship?Show answer
The voice positions the responder as a confidant or witness to private experience. First-person retrospective narration often does this. Hamlet's soliloquies do this within a play.
What is the ironic relationship?Show answer
The voice asks the responder to see more than the narrator or characters see. Nick Carraway in Gatsby grants the responder ironic distance from his own claims. The relationship is one of shared knowledge.
What is the implicated relationship?Show answer
The voice makes the responder party to something they would prefer not to be party to. Macbeth's soliloquies pull the responder into a mind they would not choose to enter. 1984's final pages do similar work.
What is choir?Show answer
Voices that fit together to render a collective experience. The texture of the text is the harmony.
What is counterpoint?Show answer
Voices that resist each other, holding contradictory positions the text refuses to resolve.