Visitors who are interesting in this site for the past writings of students from my class will notice an absence of late. I’m no longer teacher the Year 12 Literature course, but I’ll leave this site open for students to learn and steal from other students.
I’m really proud of the contributions of all my past students and I think they would be more than happy to see this site remain open.
My next project is to see how blogging goes with my Year 10 class in 2015. The address for that class will be
Provide an analysis of how Malouf uses language to convey the settlers’ fear of Gemmy. In your response, consider such things as imagery, connotation, tense, point of view, diction.
In today’s lesson, we talked about power in relation to The Handmaid’s Tale.
Write a brief summary of what you learned, and give examples from other texts we have studied that demonstrate your understanding of power in terms of today’s lesson.
Write a one-page response to what you have learned about Atwood’s manipulation of the Romance genre in the novel.
You might consider:
What are the generic ‘markers’, the conventions of the Romance genre that appear in the novel?
What does Atwood do to manipulate these?
Does this manipulation have a larger purpose?
To the last point, I would urge you to consider the following. The Romance genre perpetuates myths about gender. Among these is that through romantic relationships women are somehow saved, completed or made meaningful. Inherent in this is an assumption of an innate deficit in what it means to be a woman. I suspect that Atwood might take issue with this.
I have given you a hard copy of a very useful essay on The Handmaid’s Tale. I want you to read it with one clear purpose: what can I steal from this essay and use in my own examination responses?
Yes, the moral ambiguity of this statement is not lost on me. Let me try the academically correct version: what are the key takeaways that I can use.
The kinds of things you are looking for are:
What are the key points that Miner uses in her analysis of the novel (i.e. the relationship between genre and meaning in the novel)?
What are the key phrases that you can bring to your own writing?
What are the key quotes from the novel that Miner says you should pay attention to?
Make notes on these and be prepared to discuss tomorrow.
Homework:
Read at least three of the sample essays on Edmodo and note down the key ideas/phrases that you can borrow from each.
The Creative Writing stimulus will be “Wall”. What a great concept to build upon. I look forward the this anthology of writing from you all!
2 – Select one of the prose fiction texts from your Support Texts booklet. Look at your chosen text as if it were an unseen exam text. Plan out a reading of the text by annotating the text and coming to class with:
Mr Derby's 12 Literature 3A/3B Class 
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