Quick questions on Representations in texts: concepts, identities, times and places (QCE English Unit 3)

The most important conceptual distinction. A text does not reflect the world (as a mirror would) and does not record it (as a camera approximates). A text represents the world by selecting from it, ordering what is selected, naming the selections, and leaving the rest at the edges. The selection is the meaning.

A concept is an abstract idea a text gives shape to: justice, freedom, masculinity, motherhood, country, courage, success, home. Concepts are represented through the situations the text constructs around them.

Identity is the textual construction of who a character or group is. Modern QCE work typically treats identity as multiple and contested (gender, race, class, sexuality, age, ability, religion, locality) rather than singular.

A time can be a historical period (the colonial period, the postwar years, the 1990s) or a smaller temporal frame (a single day, a season, a generation). Texts represent times by selecting from them.

A place in a text is never the place. It is a representation of the place built from a small set of features the text chooses to foreground.

The dot point names what representations carry: attitudes, values and beliefs. These are not stated directly in most texts; they are conveyed through the construction.

Paraphrasing the content. Writing what the text says about the place, identity, concept or time instead of how the text represents it. The dot point asks for the how.

A concept is given to a character to carry. Justice in To Kill a Mockingbird is embodied by Atticus Finch; that embodiment is one representation of the concept among many possible.

A concept is defined by what the text refuses. The text that represents courage by spending three chapters on a refusal of courage is constructing the concept in negative.

A concept named or returned to across the text gains weight. A novel that names hope four times in its final pages is doing conceptual work the reader is meant to register.

The first time a character is named (and how) sets the frame. A protagonist introduced as Mr Wilson reads differently from the same protagonist introduced as Jim. Pronoun choice, racial markers, age markers, role labels all do work.

What characters do in front of others. Identity in fiction is performed and performed for an audience inside the text (other characters) and an audience outside it (the reader).

Identity is built against something. The text that constructs a young woman's identity dramatises the institutions (school, family, romance, work) that contest it. The contestation is part of the identity.

Material objects, social practices, language registers and political referents place a text in a time. A novel set in the 1980s that includes a specific song, a specific political event and a specific brand is constructing the period through markers the reader is meant to register.

A retrospective frame (a narrator looking back) constructs a time differently from a present tense narration of the same period. The frame is part of the representation.