Quick questions on Critical perspectives on literary texts: applied lenses for IA2 (QCE English Unit 3)

Directs attention to: voicing of women, what kinds of work and feeling are assigned to which characters, the marriage plot's role in narrative closure, the silences of women in the text, the gendered economy of authority. A feminist reading can also attend to constructions of masculinity, especially where masculinity is treated as the unmarked default.

Directs attention to: the construction of place (whose country, named or unnamed), the representation of First Nations characters or characters from colonised cultures (centred or peripheral, given interiority or rendered as types), the language of the text (whose linguistic register is treated as standard), the assumed reader (metropolitan or local).

Directs attention to: which characters' work is shown and which is invisible, how property and inheritance are treated, the resolution offered to economic problems (often through individual virtue or marriage rather than collective change), the assumed class position of the reader.

Directs attention to: setting as backdrop or as agent, the implied ethics of the human-environment relationship, the representation of non-human animals, the treatment of country in Australian texts (including the layered question of Indigenous custodianship), the timescale the text operates on.

Directs attention to: the implied reader the text addresses, the gaps the reader must fill, the moments the text invites identification or distance, the reading expectations the text confirms or violates.

Directs attention to: dreams, displacements, repeated motifs, the structure of family relations, what the text refuses to name directly.

Directs attention to: the marriage plot's heteronormative assumptions, friendships that exceed their official frame, the temporal structures of the text (queer time as a way of refusing the lifecycle the text otherwise endorses).

A short orientation to each. Each lens has a primary question it asks and a set of textual features it directs attention to.

Psychoanalytic criticism. Primary question: How does the text represent the unconscious, desire, repression and the symbolic structures of selfhood? Directs attention to: dreams, displacements, repeated motifs, the structure of family relations, what the text refuses to name directly.

A practical procedure usable in IA2 drafting.

A persistent IA2 trap is allowing the critical perspective to become the subject of the essay. The dot point and the IA2 criteria are clear: the text is the subject, and the critical perspective is a tool.

Some IA2 tasks invite you to bring two lenses to bear (or to compare what each makes visible). Two practical moves.

Theory as wallpaper. Naming a critical perspective in the introduction and then not using it. The perspective must be visible in every body paragraph or it is decorative.

Primary question: How does the text construct gender, and what does the construction make visible or invisible about women's experience, power and representation? Directs attention to: voicing of women, what kinds of work and feeling are assigned to which characters, the marriage plot's role in narrative closure, the silences of women in the text, the gendered economy of authority. A feminist reading can also attend to constructions of masculinity, especially where masculinity is treated as the unmarked default.

Primary question: How does the text engage with the legacies of colonisation, and whose perspective on the colonial encounter does the text construct? Directs attention to: the construction of place (whose country, named or unnamed), the representation of First Nations characters or characters from colonised cultures (centred or peripheral, given interiority or rendered as types), the language of the text (whose linguistic register is treated as standard), the assumed reader (metropolitan or local).