2021HSCShort answer

Q4

4 marks

Question

Text 4 — Nonfiction extract
Analyse how Didem Caia uses literary devices to reflect on her experience.

Text 4 — Nonfiction extract I was hiking. A familiar path in the Otway ranges. The mist had set in. I sometimes drift into a kind of mental autopilot when hiking here because I’ve experienced it so often. This particular time, however, I found myself looking up into an unfamiliar area about half an hour in, not knowing exactly where I was. It was a simple mistake, I hadn’t been paying enough attention to where I was going, and consequently I veered off the path. When I glanced up and realised the woods did not look as I was expecting them to I felt a rush of exhilaration. The woods became instantaneously new . . . My sense memory was momentarily destabilised, and the resulting experience was a reminder of how the familiar can suddenly appear as new. I’d walked here many times before, and the scent of hung-over raindrops, the sound of gravel, touch of leaves, tree trunks and the sight of falling sunshine diamonds, had picture booked their way into my mind’s eye. But in this moment that eye was suddenly and unexpectedly awakened to a new way of seeing . . . I’ve left out a step. Before I experienced the release of being disoriented, before I surrendered to it, I felt intensely frustrated. I experienced the rigidity of my own consciousness, how instinctively resistant I was to something unexpected. Something was happening in this swirl of frustration; I wasn’t on autopilot any more. I was out of my comfort zone, and I had to participate in that instant, participate in making meaning of my surroundings in order to understand where I was. My mind had been disrupted. I looked up, I looked around, and I felt as if a force was enabling me to see the woods, not just look at them. I experienced an instantaneous transformation of consciousness; a blip in which the latent* enchantment of the everyday world manifested vividly, even if just for a fleeting moment. The woods were the stage, I was the audience, and I experienced the great creative tension of the theatre: severed from my filter of expectation, I temporarily experienced the transformation of my own reality. DIDEM CAIA Extract from New Writing. New Consciousness. New Culture. © DIDEM CAIA * latent present but not visible

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Solution

Criteria	Marks
Effectively analyses how Didem Caia uses literary devices to reflect on her experience using well-chosen supporting evidence	4
Analyses how Didem Caia uses literary devices to reflect on her experience with supporting evidence	3
Explains how Didem Caia uses literary devices to reflect on her experience	2
Provides some information about Didem Caia’s use of literary devices in the text	1

Sample answer:

In this extract, Caia deliberately structures her writing to emphasise the transformative moment when the ‘woods became instantaneously new’. She recounts the events of her hike in the first paragraph then signals her return to the moment of realisation in the second paragraph with the short opening sentence: ‘I’ve left out a step.’ She also incorporates emotive language to reflect on the stages of her revelation, from her initial ‘swirl of frustration’ when realising she is lost to the subsequent ‘rush of exhilaration’ as the world’s hidden beauty is revealed. In the final theatrical metaphor (‘the woods were the stage. I was the audience.’), Caia imagines herself interacting with the landscape, which highlights the personal nature of her discovery.

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Syllabus alignment

Common Module: Texts and Human Experiences

Texts and Human ExperiencesAnalyse and evaluate how texts use language to represent human experiences, qualities, emotions, anomalies, paradoxes and inconsistencies.

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