Read Text 2.
How does Text 2 shape your understanding of the ways your texts ‘creatively break’ dominant assumptions in the elective you have studied?
In your response, make close reference to TWO prescribed texts from your elective and ONE other text of your own choosing.
The prescribed texts for Section II are listed on pages 5−9.
Text 2
Stories surround us like air; we breathe them in, we breathe them out. The art of being fully conscious in personal life means seeing the stories and becoming their teller, rather than letting them be the unseen forces that tell you what to do. · ·
There are stories beneath the stories and around the stories. The recent event on the surface is often merely the hood ornament on the mighty social engine that is a story driving the culture. We call those “dominant narratives” or “paradigms” or “memes”[1] or “metaphors we live by” or “frameworks”. However we describe them, they are immensely powerful forces. And the dominant culture mostly goes about reinforcing the stories that are the pillars propping it up and that, too often, are also the bars of someone else’s cage. They are too often stories that should be broken, or are already broken and ruined and ruinous and way past their expiration date. They sit atop mountains of unexamined assumptions . . .
Part of the job of a great storyteller is to examine the stories that underlie the story . . . to make them visible, and sometimes to break us free of them. Break the story. Breaking is a creative act as much as making . . .
REBECCA SOLNIT Extract from Break the Story [1] memes ideas, behaviours or styles that are symbolic and easily transmitted Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises (and Essays) (specifically Break the Story ) Reproduced by permission of Granta Books
The prescribed texts for Section II are:
✦ Elective 1: Literary Homelands The prescribed texts are: • Prose Fiction – Aravind Adiga, The White Tiger – E M Forster, A Passage to India – Colm Tbín, Brooklyn • Poetry – Eileen Chong, Burning Rice The prescribed poems are: * Burning Rice * Mid-autumn Mooncakes * My Hakka Grandmother * Shophouse, Victoria Street * Chinese Ginseng * Winter Meeting * Singapore • Drama – Andrew Bovell, The Secret River [by Kate Grenville – An adaptation for the stage by Andrew Bovell] • Film – Sarah Gavron, Brick Lane Section II prescribed texts continue on page 6 The prescribed texts for Section II (continued)
✦ Elective 2: Worlds of Upheaval The prescribed texts are: • Prose Fiction – Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South – Mary Shelley, Frankenstein – Madeleine Thien, Do Not Say We Have Nothing • Poetry – Seamus Heaney, Opened Ground: Poems 1966−1996 The prescribed poems are: * Digging * The Strand at Lough Beg * Casualty * Funeral Rites * from Whatever You Say Say Nothing * Triptych • Drama – Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot • Film – Fritz Lang, Metropolis Section II prescribed texts continue on page 7 The prescribed texts for Section II (continued)
✦ Elective 3: Reimagined Worlds The prescribed texts are: • Prose Fiction – Italo Calvino, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller – Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness – Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels • Poetry – Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The Complete Poems The prescribed poems are: * The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1834) * The Eolian Harp * Kubla Khan * Christabel – Tracy K Smith, Life on Mars The prescribed poems are: * Sci-Fi * My God, It’s Full of Stars * Don’t You Wonder, Sometimes? * The Universe: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack * The Universe as Primal Scream • Film – Guillermo Del Toro, Pan’s Labyrinth Section II prescribed texts continue on page 8 The prescribed texts for Section II (continued)
✦ Elective 4: Literary Mindscapes The prescribed texts are: • Prose Fiction – William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying – Gail Jones, Sixty Lights – Katherine Mansfield, The Collected Stories * Prelude * Je ne Parle pas Français * Bliss * Psychology * The Daughters of the Late Colonel • Poetry – Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems The prescribed poems are: * I felt a Funeral, in my Brain * This is my letter to the World * I died for Beauty – but was scarce * I had been hungry, all the Years * Because I could not stop for Death * My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun * A word dropped careless on a Page • Drama – William Shakespeare, Hamlet • Film – Sofia Coppola, Lost in Translation Section II prescribed texts continue on page 9 The prescribed texts for Section II (continued)
✦ Elective 5: Intersecting Worlds The prescribed texts are: • Prose Fiction – Melissa Harrison, Clay – Alex Miller, Journey to the Stone Country – Annie Proulx, The Shipping News • Nonfiction – Tim Winton, Island Home • Poetry – William Wordsworth, William Wordsworth: The Major Works The prescribed poems are: * Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey * Three years she grew in sun and shower * My heart leaps up when I behold * Resolution and Independence * The world is too much with us * Ode (‘There was a time’) * The Solitary Reaper * The Prelude (1805) – Book One, lines 1− 67, 271− 441 • Film – Daniel Nettheim, The Hunter