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

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.

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.

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.

What kind of land, what kind of light, what kind of weather. A coastal town represented in storm light and a coastal town represented in glare are different places.

Who is shown to inhabit the place, and who is absent. A representation of country that omits its First Nations custodians is doing conceptual work that the dot point asks you to surface.

What the place feels like to be in. Affect is built through diction, sensory detail and narrative pacing. A place can be made to read as oppressive, expansive, claustrophobic or peaceful by the same set of facts.