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Module B: Critical Study of Literature
Quick questions on Representation of human concerns 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 concern, not theme?Show answer
The word "concern" is preferable to "theme" in Module B for a reason. A theme is a topic; a concern is a question.
What is "Enduring" as a critical term?Show answer
Module B rubric language often uses "enduring" to describe the kind of concerns prescribed texts engage. The term is not a compliment; it is a specification.
What is concerns across time?Show answer
Module B prescribed texts have been chosen partly because their concerns survive their original contexts. A response can argue the text's concerns across time without sliding into anachronism.
What is reflecting context without retreating to it?Show answer
The rubric also asks how the text reflects social, cultural, and historical contexts. The risk is the contextual paragraph that retreats from the text into history.
What is plot?Show answer
What the text shows happening. Plot represents a concern by depicting situations in which the concern becomes urgent.
What is character?Show answer
Who the text follows and what they do. Character represents a concern by personifying it, complicating it, or testing it.
What is form?Show answer
The kind of text the composer chose. A concern about the unreliability of single accounts is represented by a multi-narrator novel; a concern about the privacy of the self is represented by lyric.
What is language?Show answer
The sentence-level choices. A concern about restraint is represented by spare syntax; a concern about the failure of language is represented by gaps, refrains, and silences.
What is topic sentence?Show answer
Phrases the concern as a question and names the textual move that constructs it.
What is evidence?Show answer
Quoted phrases from at least two places in the text that show the concern at work.
What is analysis?Show answer
Sentences that argue how the concern is built at the level of language, form, or structure.
What is integrity move?Show answer
A sentence that argues the concern could not be constructed in this form without the specific textual choices.
What is lift?Show answer
A sentence that connects the concern to the larger argument of the response.
What is theme listing?Show answer
A paragraph that names three themes without arguing how the text constructs any of them.
What is stated, not represented?Show answer
Treating a passage where a character says something as evidence that the text "explores" the concern. Characters are not the text; what the text does with characters' speech is the analysis.