Creating Worlds - Setting in Imaginative Writing

Imagined and literary worlds are always, in some way, a reflection of the world around us. The bedrock of worldbuilding is a keen awareness of setting - and students need to understand that setting has a precise function if they are to use this element well. When I read a great book or short story, I will find myself transported to that setting and sometimes it will be the one thing that stays with me longest after  I finish reading.

An effective setting will do some or all of the following:

• Remain constant in the reader's impression of the story, even when it isn't being explicitly mentioned. This can be achieved through the consistent use of detail and ensuring that nothing occurs in the narrative to contradict the setting.
• Make use of a set of rules - is everything we read a logical extension of the setting? If the setting is an unusual one, then this needs to interact with the characters and narrative in a way befitting this. 
• Be aware of time and place. A setting should have a particular geography but there also needs to be an awareness of the time of day and year, which may shift according to the progression of the narrative. If it is the height of an Australian summer, for example, then the characters need to act in a way that reflects the constant and often oppressive heat that comes with this.
• Reflect theme or a key idea. The most effective setting will often interact with characters in a way that reveals a concept or message that the writer seeks to explore. 

When we teach setting within a schooling context we need to also think about the syllabus. By all means, students should be encouraged to write for pleasure and to explore their imagination without limit, and time can be spent on this in the junior grades or (if your school has them) English creative writing electives. But if we're looking at the pointy end of the curriculum (in my case, NSW), we do need to teach students how to write within the scope of the Craft of Writing module for the HSC, or for  English Extension 1. This means having the ability to write a short piece within 25-50 minutes (depending on the HSC question and course).

So with this in mind, I would ask students to also think of setting in the following way:

• The previously mentioned dot points still largely apply.
• Come to a decision about whether character or setting will take precedence. Both should reflect the idea the student wants to explore, but if the amount of examination time is particularly short (for example, a double-barrelled Craft of Writing question that requires a reflection as well as a piece of original writing) then I think a student will struggle to give ample space to both characterisation and setting. 
• If focusing on setting, consider how it relates to the idea we want to explore. How does the setting reflect genre? Why is the writer writing about this setting? What is the purpose? How can we ensure that the detail included is consistently relevant to the idea or theme? 
• Don't fall into the trap of fantasy worldbuilding - there is limited space in an HSC examination and we need to consider the stimulus and the parameters of the question. It's great to write an evocative setting but this isn't the place to delve into said setting's extensive history and geography.  

What follows is an activity that uses real world locations to provide inspiration. In NSW it could be used for Years 7-10 English, Year 11 Reading to Write, Year 12 Craft of Writing, or Extension English Literary Worlds. 

Students are taken on a tour of 20 slides - 2 for each setting - and asked to respond to them in a way that will get them started on the above journey. The questions below aren't fixed, they're just a way to get students thinking descriptively and, more importantly, conceptually. 

1. Describe what you see in as much detail as possible.
2. Boil it down to just one key idea that could be used in a piece of writing.
3. What sort of short story could you tell in relation to this setting?
4. What would this short story be about in a single word? (EG. Desperation? Survival? Hope? Secrecy?, etc.)

The slides can be found here - Creating Worlds.

Happy writing!

Disclaimer: The above activity was compiled specifically for this blog. 

Punk Punk - A Gallery of Subgenres

The -punk suffix genres can be a great discussion starter; there are various permutations and sub-categories that force or push stories in certain directions, and that writers experiment by combining elements to create new science fiction subgenres by leaning into particular aesthetics and ideas. 

Without taking retroactive classifications into account, the cyberpunk genre is unarguably where it all all started. Cyberpunk combines a dystopian near-future setting with a heavy emphasis on emerging technologies; in the 1980s this meant things like the internet, virtual reality, and practical body modification. Cyberpunk became a prominent subgenre after William Gibson helped to define it in his groundbreaking 1984 novel Neuromancer.

Just for fun, here are a range of other subgenres that have developed in the years since, each of which use the -punk suffix as a marker to let audiences know they are engaging with a fictional world. The various subgenres explore potential futures through highly specialised aesthetics - some of them are superficial in outlook, emphasising style over narrative, whereas others hone in on particular themes and concerns.

Steampunk: The most popular of the -punk subgenres (after the 80s/90s computer tech of cyberpunk) is the Victorian-era aesthetic of steampunk, which is perhaps as much about cosplay and fandom as it is about colonial-flavoured alternative realities. Think Jules Verne, The Golden Compass, some Studio Ghibli films.

Dieselpunk: Most of the -punk subgenres are heavily fixated on a particular aesthetic and its through this that the genre is defined. In this sense, dieselpunk presents alternative realities built from combustible engines and 1930s tech. See: Indiana Jones, The Rocketeer, the comic series Hellboy, the first Captain America film.

Clockpunk: Clockpunk is a subgenre that draws on Renaissance designs and iconography to present an alternative sci-fi realm that images a post-medieval world of light and strength. Think Da Vinci, conquistadors, 15th century Europe.

Rococopunk: This seems to be more stylistic than an actual genre of storytelling. It relates to a combination of cyberpunk and rococo/baroque fashion. One of the best things about the -punk suffix is that the suffix itself has the power to inspire bold new combinations of history and storytelling, with fandoms branching out to create their own costumes from the most flowery recesses of their imagination. When I hear 'Rococopunk' I mostly think of music videos like The Killers 'Mr Brightside' or Adam and the Ants.

Atompunk: When 1950s atomic-age aesthetics are used to present an alternative future with a decidedly retro look. Sometimes called 'Raygun Gothic', used to describe everything from The Jetsons to the original series of Star Trek or the film Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow.

Biopunk: Biopunk is a sci-fi subgenre that focuses on biotechnology and synthesised biology. Think David Cronenberg's films eXistenZ or Crimes of the Future, the animal-splicing of Island of Dr Moreau, H.R. Giger's monster designs. A genre that explores the blurring of lines between technology and nature, and the disturbing consequences that might ensue.

Solarpunk: An aesthetic built on a hypothetical utopian future scenario in which climate, environmental, and sustainability issues have been solved. It functions as both a subgenre of sci-fi and art, and can also be observed in the more speculative flourishes of architecture and town planning.

Formicapunk: This is a recent branch that demonstrates the way that the -punk genre tree will always continue to grow and revisit territory in new ways. Formicapunk leans heavily on retro-futurism and the stylistic flourishes of the 80s. Also known as casettepunk. You already know this look and love it.

Lunarpunk: A less-developed idea but one in which scenarios have been put forth where sustainable technology is combined with Wicca, supernatural, and pagan-esque iconography. 

Decopunk: Calling upon the aesthetics of the Art Deco movement, this subgenre combines 1920s architecture with sci-fu futurism... hello Metropolis! Aside from the superficial elements that contribute to a particular look, this subgenre also alludes to fascism and Italian futurism.

Feudalpunk: A personal favourite. Feudalpunk combines sci-fi tropes with medieval settings and scenarios in order to explore the intersection of society, control of knowledge, and the devastation of technologies beyond our understanding. It's not a popular subgenre but it certainly exists, see: A Canticle for Leibowitz, Gene Wolfe's novels, the original plans for Alien 3, Riddley Walker, and Dune.

Steelpunk: The uglier, updated, more industrial son of dieselpunk. Rivets, hardware, and pollution abound in this grimy post-apocalyptic permutation. Common in '90s and '00s visions of the future - see films like The Terminator, Mad Max, Robocop, The Edge of Tomorrow.

Silkpunk: A steampunk alternative that draws on Asian antiquity rather than the Victorian era. First identified by Chinese-American writer Ken Liu, this subgenre has been a point of contention in relation to accusations of cultural appropriation - with some Asian writers asserting that its co-opting by Western authors serves as a creative intellectual cousin to colonialism or exploitation. 

Elfpunk: Elfpunk transports fae and elven characters into a gritty urban setting - exploring a juxtaposition of the faerie realm with motorcycles, rock bands, and nightclubs.

Sandalpunk: This one combines technology and speculative worlds with alternative versions of ancient European and Middle Eastern civilisations. Examples include Stargate, various depictions of Atlantis, and 300.

Stonepunk: Stonepunk does the same thing as other -punk subgenres but with dinosaurs and/or a prehistoric setting. The Flintstones didn't set out to slot into this genre (it hadn't been invented yet) but it retroactively fits the bill! Perhaps more of a fantasy derivative than sci-fi.

Cattlepunk: This is the territory where sci-fi meets the Western - cyborg cowboys, robot horses, and super-powered railways abound. This genre perhaps exist mostly as an excuse to keep the tropes of the Western genre alive into the 21st century. Examples include Cowboys and Aliens, the comic East of West, the Will Smith movie Wild Wild West, Westworld, and the TV series Firefly.

And, as far as I know, that's pretty much it for the moment. There are others that don't feel as developed or don't seem differentiated enough from other genres (nanopunk, hopepunk, capepunk, oceanpunk, nowpunk, mythpunk) so I've left these out. Perhaps one day we'll see an Indigenous Australian approach that things like Cleverman could retroactively fit into (ochre-punk?) If you know any other -punk genres that I haven't mentioned, please let me know!

Disclaimer: This is an expanded version of a Twitter thread I wrote five months ago. Most of the images were sourced through Pinterest, where such things are shared and shared again in an endless recursive loop. If you are the artist of any of these pictures and would like credit or for the image to be removed, just let me know and I'll do that.

The Literary Canon: What's In It?

If you're feeling brave, feel free to look up any Twitter debate on 'The Canon'. It's an increasingly partisan debate and... yeah, that's all I'll say about that. I don't really feel up to arguing in favour of either side, whether we should be focusing our teaching on the classics of the canon or whether we should be attempting to destablise the canon by looking at texts written by marginalised voices - it's just too big a question for me to pour any energy into right now. 

I do confess, however, to having more than a passing interest in the canon. 

My introduction to the concept of a 'canon' was through my childhood love of Doctor Who, wherein fans would refer to anything that formed part of the 'official' narrative as 'The Canon'. Even now in Doctor Who fandom there are endless debates about whether something counts as canon or not. Many of these fans aren't even aware that the term has a far more academic meaning. 

Next, as a teenager, I realised that the term's etymology was partially linked to theology. Thinking about it in this way - that the Canon refers to the texts officially accepted by the Church (and this extends to canonized saints) - it helped me to make sense of why the term has come to be used in various other ways.

Then I learned about the Literary Canon, and the Western Canon; maddeningly elastic concepts that can seem as solid as marble or as slippery as an avalanche. And the canons go on... there's a canon for comics, a canon for film, a canon of short stories, one for poetry, one for music, and ones for art, philosophy, architecture, and on and on and on. If enough people think it's important then there might be a canon for it.

And let me be unequivocal here: there is no exact Western or Literary Canon. 

Isn't it fun? Exclusive? Exhausting?

I enjoy making lists. So I made a list to represent the Literary Canon (and one for comics, one for science fiction, one for film, etc.). As I've said above, there's no one, single, definitive Literary Canon (despite what anyone tells you), so this is a living meta-list, one that I continue to add to, and it so far represents information pulled from the following places:

• 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die - a decent attempt at a collaborative canon that utilises contributions from approximately 100 academics and eminent literary critics. 
• The Bokklubben World Library - a master list of the '100 best books' compiled by the Norwegian Book Club in 2002. Created via proposals from 100 writers from 54 separate countries.
• Classic Chinese Novels - this refers to the 10 key novels within China's own literary canon.
• Guardian Top 100 - I included this because I like the literature stuff the Guardian puts out, and I wanted something a bit more popular included.
  
• Times Top 100 - for an American perspective. 
• Pulitzer - America's most prestigious literary prize.
• Miles Franklin - Australia's oldest and perhaps most academically-respected prize. Included here because I'm Australian.
  
• Booker Prize - one of the most well-known international prizes in English language literature. I've also included the shortlisted novels alongside the winners.
• Costa and Commonwealth - I've included these two major literary prizes just to try and broaden the list out a little with more recent titles.
• Asian Classics - a collation of a few titles considered to be part of the canon across the continent of Asia.
  
• Modern Library - a 100+ year old publishing initiative where a board of 'prominent thinkers' put together a Top 100 fiction novels.
• The Western Canon - Harold Bloom is probably the chief Canonist of the 20th century. His 'Western Canon' sought to pull together the definitive list of texts that have informed Western thinking. I've only included the novels and full length non-fiction texts from the list - I've opted to consider the poetry and plays as their own separate canons.

Some ground rules I established while sifting through these canons for the curating of this Literary Canon:

1. The focus is on novels and books. These are primarily fictional, though there are some crossover non-fiction novels that seemed to find their way onto some of the above lists, so I've included those too.
2. I've left out plays/drama, poetry, and opera - I feel like these could have their own lists, especially as they appear to be becoming increasingly niche as the decades and centuries go on. The only poetry that is the exception to this rule is when an author creates a long-form poem or narrative poem that exists as a singular book. 
3. There is the odd graphic novel that made its way onto some of the above lists (such as Watchmen) but I've chosen to leave this out as the Comics Canon is quite extensive and deserves to live as its own list. 
4. Some of the above lists include the occasional book series. In these cases I've broken each series up into the individual books.
5. There are not any individual short stories in this Literary Canon but there are some entire short story collections - I've included these to reflect wherever they've been mentioned by the above lists.
   
6. I have not added anything that I personally felt should be in there. That would defeat the purpose of researching the canon.
   

 Anyway... here's the list!

Random Rules for Writing

NaNoWriMo

Late last year I threw myself into NaNoWriMo. If you're not aware, this stands for National Novel Writing Month and is a fun (fun?) exercise that favours quantity over quality. Madness, really, but for an English teacher it's a worthwhile activity. Have you ever encouraged students to use lightning writing strategies? I see it as being akin to that. 

This was my third attempt at NaNoWriMo. The first time, in about 2009, I barely wrote 2000 words before running out of steam. I spontaneously decided to write an Australian Gold Rush era novel about a bushranger who teams up with a Chinese miner to fight monsters. Then I realised that, without a plot or any substantial time for research, I was just punching words out into the dark, so I gave up. 

The second time was in 2016 and, perhaps learning from my mistakes, I opted to just journal about my memories. I got to about 25 000 words out of the required 50 000 word count. It was easier because I could approach things episodically and in a non-linear fashion. To be honest, I can't remember why I didn't get any further... it's most likely that I probably got too busy with work or just lost interest. 

In 2020 I was prompted by a friend to undertake the challenge again. Well! I managed about 30 000 words this time and then things got too busy again. I became a Head Teacher Teaching & Learning at a new school and filled in as relieving Head Teacher TAS/CAPA for Term 4 and, well, it was a tremendous experience and I had to put aside my NaNoWriMo project. Luckily, with not much doing in the holiday break before we go back, I've managed to get back to the novel and momentum has thankfully continued. 

Writing the Novel

In my life as an aspiring writer I've attempted to seriously write a novel two other times (outside of NaNoWriMo). The first one, which I undertook in my pre-teaching life, took me about ten years. By the time I had finished writing it my life had changed so much that I was no longer interested in it. I looked at it and decided that I appreciated the experience of putting it together but that it just wasn't me anymore. 

The second one was a much more ambitious attempt and remains unfinished - it fell by the wayside after I became a permanent teacher in 2014. I can see myself going back to it at some point but I'll no doubt completely rewrite what I've got. I had already switched from first person to third person while expanding my outline and I'm still unsure where I sit with the kind of narrative voice I want to use on this one. The world has also changed a lot since 2010 (when I started writing it) so there's that to think about too. 

Finding a Different Approach

So, for NaNoWriMo 2020, how was I going to manage writing an entire novel in a short space of time without boring myself? My first step was committing to a fictional novella. I've written a lot of sentences - in blogs, articles, textbooks, short stories, poetry - and I felt like I needed shake things up in my approach. So I came up with some random rules to stop myself from falling back on certain things. These were things that I either felt like I tended to rely on too much, or things that become roadblocks when I try to write. 

This is what I came up with:

• No direct speech. The only way I was to convey dialogue is through reported speech. 
• Each chapter reflects one day only.
• There can be no references made to the past. This includes referring back to anything that happened the day before. Each chapter only focuses on that one day.
• Maintaining a mixture of past/present tense to reflect the short distance of time between events portrayed and the subsequent writing of each journal entry. 
• Minimal reference to how the narrator is feeling about anything.
• Why have a compound sentence when two simple ones will do?
• Keep punctuation simplistic too. This means no hyphens, no ellipses, no brackets, and definitely no semi-colons!
  
• Each entry should make both direct and indirect references to the writing process employed by the narrator (rather than turning into a straightforward fictional narrative). 
• All of these rules are sacrosanct and must be stuck to for the entirety of the novel. They will never be broken. Except for the times when they are. 
  

I found that these rules became much more of a blessing than a restriction. I actually finished my first draft and I don't hate it :)

Literary Homelands Essay Response

I sat the Trial HSC Exam.

I'd seen other English teachers talk about doing this, and I'd done it earlier on in my career with Standard English to 'test' myself for reassurance, so the idea to undertake an Extension English 1 examination wasn't completely foreign to me. I won't lie and say it was a piece of cake; I have to admit that I felt kind of nervous walking into an examination with no notes to rely on and having to write a response legibly enough by hand.

I also feel nervous sharing my responses here on the blog... going into that big cold school hall and having to adhere to those time limits was surprisingly intimidating, but maybe the writing will be useful to someone's students. Hopefully.

Anyway, I wanted to do this for a few very important reasons.

1. There doesn't seem to be a textbook out there filled with Extension English 1 essay responses. I inquired about this with a publisher that I've previously contributed Standard and Advanced essays to and the response was, understandably, that the market was too small. I decided that starting to write my own essays might be the way to go about it.
2. I wanted an essay that was written in as close to student conditions as possible. I sometimes think that the 'Band 6' (or in the case of Extension, Band E4) responses provided by teachers (myself included) are slightly disingenuous as they often aren't written by hand, in timed conditions, or isolated from revision notes.
3. Understanding how the examination works feels like a really important thing that I should know. The only way for me to get a fair summation of this is to do it myself, otherwise I'd forever be an observer looking in.
4. I often feel like I shouldn't ask my students to do anything that I wouldn't do. I want to be able to perform well in exam scenarios... teaching students how to write essays for exams without being able to do it myself has made me feel in the past like I was missing something.
   

I was lucky this year as the examination had been set and finalised several terms ago so I was able to go into the examination without remembering what the questions were. As I said earlier, it was kind of nerve-wracking, and I found myself wandering around mumbling quotes to myself in the preceding days in an effort to memorise some appropriate textual evidence.

The Experience

In the past I've given my Extension students the advice that they should do their Elective essay first, and that they should devote 1 hour to each of the two papers. I tried to follow this advice and I was mostly successful, but here's what I learned:

• I ended up needing at least 70 minutes to write an essay with four properly supported body paragraphs.
  
• The Literary Worlds section, even with its two separate parts, only ended up taking me about 30 minutes. The more organic nature of imaginative writing meant that I wasn't constantly needing to stop and keep track of what I was doing in quite the same way that I needed to for an essay.
• I planned out my essay fairly carefully. This burnt up valuable time but it was entirely necessary to ensure that I didn't stray too far from the question or my thesis. I kept having to stop myself mid-paragraph to go back and check on the question, the thesis, and my plan - this is part of why this section took me so long.
• My planning involved quickly writing down my 12 quotes/textual examples, brainstorming a thesis statement of sorts, and then calling upon four different talking points that our study of Literary Homelands is built around in class. I then matched up each of the textual examples to each of the talking points before I started writing my response.
  
• In writing the Literary Worlds imaginative response I had to be careful to remember I was writing for the purpose of reflecting. To this end, I ensured that I consciously used a couple of techniques that I could discuss in reference to the way we had studied the module in class - this meant crafting a piece of writing that allowed for some implied discussion of reader-response theory, demonstrated how I had both mirrored and subverted the stimulus text, and indicated an understanding of the question that had been posed in the examination.
  
• Side Note: I was conscious of writing something that was of benefit to my current students, so I resisted writing too academically. That is to say, I wrote within the constraints of what I hope my students will be able to write. If I'm being honest and self-critical then I think that my elective essay may be too formulaic and that my imaginative piece could have leaned a bit more on the Joyce stimulus.
  

The best aspect of all of this is that I can now safely say I have a much better appreciation of what Extension students need to keep in mind while doing their exam. In concise terms: it's a lot.

The Exam Questions

The exam used is from the practise responses that can be easily found online at the NESA website. I wanted to try and make sure that the Trial HSC matched the HSC as much as possible, so I've relied on this exam for the first two times I've taught this course.

In light of this, if my students went looking for these practise papers and did them all in advance then they'd have a big advantage going into the trial exam. But, really, I think I'd be so overjoyed that they did this much preparation that I wouldn't mind them having this 'advantage' (I say 'advantage' but really, it's just assessment as learning). Suffice to say, I aim to write a new, original paper next time I teach the course - whenever that may be.

The Responses

Section 1, Part A

She sat outside watching the morning sun embrace her backyard. Eveline had never felt more awake than she did now.

This was a new world of action and desire and excitement and endless opportunities. Her memories of home were fading, in fact - 'home' was starting to disappear altogether. Home? But Australia was now home. That place in the past, Ireland, was something that happened to someone else. Not home.

"Mrs. Jones, when do you expect your husband will be arriving?"

It took a moment for Eveline to register that the butler was talking to her. She turned and caught his raised eyebrow before he re-composed himself.

"Oh, I don't know - he's always traveling. I shan't be surprised if you never get to see him."

The butler sniffed, clearly unimpressed. What did Eveline care? This was the other side of the world. If she wanted to say she was Mrs. Jones, that she had an ersatz husband off fighting wars or exploring jungles, that she was educated and upwardly mobile... If she wanted to say these things then how could this snooty, ridiculous butler challenge her? In Australia, she could be anything.

Yes. The morning sun was radiant as it glinted off the river over yonder, as it reflected off the greenhouse, and breathed life into everything it touched. Eveline? Who was Eveline? She was Sabrina Jones now. She must think of herself as Sabrina, not Eveline.

"Pass me that, would you, James?" she said in her best, most haughty voice.

The butler reluctantly gave it to her and she held it high in the sunlight.

Beautiful.

Let them try and take it away from Sabrina. Just let them try.

Section 1, Part B

In order to invite the reader into my continuation of Joyce's 'Eveline' I took the opening sentence of the writer's original text and mirrored its structure while subverting its intentions. Where Joyce wrote of the character looking out from an interior world through a window, I decided to place her outside to symbolise a difference in place. Where he wrote 'evening', I have used 'morning sun'. This is intended to suggest a new, positive beginning for the character through the use of pathetic fallacy, and Eveline is no longer 'tired' (as described in Joyce's opening lines) but now "had never felt more awake".

To give the impression of this being a more energetic setting and frame of mind for Eveline, I used polysyndeton, "action and desire and excitement and..." The character is clearly open to new possibilities now that she has left Ireland for Australia. A stream-of-consciousness approach is used in the second paragraph with fragmentary and truncated sentences, as well as rhetorical questions, to show the process whereby Eveline constructs a new identity for herself - Sabrina Jones. This acts as a symbol for the embracing of new opportunities.

Needing to generate a potential for conflict, I have made some suggestion that the butler is suspicious by having him ask after her "ersatz husband". The reader is encouraged to engage with further mystery through my choice to have the object at the end remain unnamed. By referring to it obliquely as just 'it' and using an enigmatic, one-word paragraph of "Beautiful" (which could refer to anything - the object, this new situation Eveline is in, the view of the backyard), I hope to unsettle the reader enough to provoke their own reader-response: a deliberate choice with no intended meaning at this point, as I want to convey how reader-response theory can work.

Download Section 1 Response.

Essay Plan

Section 2

Composers use their texts as a platform from which character voices are employed to illustrate the changing world. As a result of processes of modernity such as marginalisation, hybridisation, colonialism, and the instability of language, these characters become representative of the formation of complex identities that result from shifting homelands in the 20th and 21st centuries. The creation of these identities can be observed in texts such as Eileen Chong's suite of poetry, Burning Rice, the play The Secret River by Andrew Bovell, and Ding Xiaoqi's short story, 'The Angry Kettle', each of which provide a forum in which authors can explore the aforementioned ideas.

With the impact of diasporic migration, communities and individuals often find themselves marginalised within Australia's constantly changing society. Eileen Chong explores this idea in her homage to her Chinese ancestry, 'My Hakka Grandmother', with the line "Wild birds in search of a new place to call home" illustrating the lack of power inherent in migrating peoples. The Hakka people are a nomadic group lacking in a fixed homeland, as evidence by the use of the adjective 'wild' in a metaphor designed to evoke images of a group forced to 'fly' from place to place. The connotation of the word 'new' further conveys the idea that the persona's people have lost their previous homeland: they lack the security afforded by a fixed community. This process of disempowerment in similarly expressed in Xiaoqi's short story 'The Angry Kettle', wherein the Chinese protagonist faced with a symbol of white Australian dominance, the titular kettle, remarks that she "barely had the guts to look straight at it". This allusion to the kettle's power lends the object a sense of personification as if it were an intimidating force to be reckoned with - an item that symbolises historical English superiority in Australian society. The process of marginalisation that results from unequal relationships of power is further explored in Bovell's adaptation of 'The Secret River', in which the play's events reach an appalling climax whereby the increasingly dominant white settlers massacre the Dharug people while singing a song of home, 'London Bridge'. The contrast between the tragedy that befalls the Dharug and the image of grown men singing a song so well-known to children provides a tonal dissonance that illustrates the way British power has disrupted the natural balance of the Dharug people - a process of violence that pushes them to the margins of their own world, so to speak.

The ability of migrant identities to find a foothold in their new homeland may also inevitability lead to a process in which new, hybrid identities are formed. Against their best wishes, the people of the Dharug in 'The Secret River' find themselves subjected to the influence of their European invaders. This is perhaps best exemplified by the ex-convict Thornhill giving Ngalamalum the anglicised name of 'Jack'. Despite the insistence of his son Willy that the Dharug man's name is easy to pronounce with practice, Thornhill's self-assurance in his own culture results in his own choice of name being imposed on Ngalamalum, a metonym for the process of re-naming that has seen Aboriginal culture develop accordingly in times since. This process is explored in other ways by Chinese-Australian migrants too, with Chong's poem 'Chinese Ginseng' labelling the taste of the eponymous Chinese medicinal herb as 'bitter-sweet' - a paradoxical description that showcases her mixed emotions about the traditions of her mother and illustrates the complex ambiguity of being Chinese in the Western world. Conversely, the Chinese protagonist of 'The Angry Kettle' resists the attempt of her housemate Michael to subsume her traditional identity completely. When Michael racistly asks her if Chinese people have to eat 'fried food' she hyperbolically retorts with a question of whether all Australians have to "treat their kettles like sweethearts," a simile that subverts his discriminatory question by turning it back on him. In considering each of these texts it becomes clear that the ongoing development of cultural identities is something that happens in connection to opposing identities that exist in the same space.

The creation of shared spaces is, in the case of Australia, a result of the 18th and 19th century practice of colonialism. In 'The Secret River', the settler Thornhill makes the claim that "dug-over dirt" is as "good as planting a flag." This simile references a belief that the British way of using land is the only true proof of ownership, and is used by Thornhill to discount the validity of Dharug pre-existence along the Hawkesbury River. This event is representative of larger historical events that impacted on Australia's Indigenous peoples and would have an ongoing ramification on their concept of identity in years to come. The violent impact of colonialism is also felt in more subtle ways, with Chong's persona in 'Burning Rice' sadly looking at her burnt rice and metaphorically describing it as "my ancestors' ashes in a bowl", an observation that illustrates the loss of connection to her previous homeland that has result from living in a nation still characterised by British cultural dominance. This dominance is also evident in 'The Angry Kettle', with the ever-present kitchen implement signifying the living spectre of British colonialism that still sits, 'shiny' and important, in the average Australian home. The narrator of this short story demonstrates this through the juxtaposition cause by her dirty 'fingerprint' on the gleaming kettle - an act that symbolises the intrusion of Asian identity into the homogenously white world that had grown from British colonisation of Australia. Each of these texts convey how composers use the voices and presence of these characters to explore the way identities change through experience.

The instability of language is another key component of literary texts that embody changing cultural identity. In Chong's poem, 'Winter Meeting', the persona describes a meeting with an older Chinese poet in Melbourne. As a suggested for her depression, Kim Booey Cheng tells the persona to read the famous traditional Chinese poets. She is, however, unable to, reflecting, "But where you go / I cannot follow... I lost the language years ago." This metaphor reveals the way in which a Chinese-Australian's changing command of Chinese language can affect one's sense of cultural connection. In contrast, the Chinese protagonist of 'The Angry Kettle' is unable to grasp the finer nuances of Australian English, describing her housemates words as "pouring out", a verb choice that carries a connotation of natural force, of hot water from a kettle, of something that cannot be stopped so that understanding can be checked. It is at this point in the story that the reader first gets a sense that a division is appearing between the protagonist and her housemate, and it is a division created by a difference of language. The power of language is utilised in a different way by Andrew Bovell in 'The Secret River'. The Aboriginal characters speak in the Dharug dialect, which is used to allow the audience to experience the cultural barriers between the British and the Indigenous. At various points in the text there are moments of misunderstanding that result from Thornhill's ignorance of the language, and his unwillingness to learn it foreshadows that it is a language doomed to extinction.

Through examining 'The Angry Kettle', 'Burning Rice' and 'The Secret River', readers can get a sense of how cultural identity is fluidic, flexible process that happens in interaction the development of new 'homeland' spaces. Through a process of self experience, characters shift and resist and hybridise in the modern world, and authors present their voices so this can be better illustrated.

Download Section 2 Response.

Book Journeys: Gormenghast

The adjective 'Gormenghastian' has been used by writers to allude to things "Resembling or pertaining to the fictional Gormenghast, an enormous sprawling Gothic castle mired in inexplicable traditions" (Wiktionary)

The Gormenghast trilogy is both peerless and tragically underrated. The writing style alone is enough to recommend it to anyone who is interested in reading and/or writing in general. The author Mervyn Peake was a British poet, artist, illustrator, writer. In other words, he was a bit of a modern renaissance man, and the Gormenghast trilogy is his magnum opus. Conceived as a chronicle of the life of the fictitious character Titus Groan, the three books that make up this trilogy follow Titus from birth to young adulthood. It was Peake's intention to follow his hero from birth to death but unfortunately his own death from dementia prevented this and so we are instead left with just the trilogy; Titus Groan (1946), Gormenghast (1950), and Titus Alone (1959).

It's probably somewhat false to refer to it as 'The Gormenghast Trilogy' as it's neither precisely about Gormenghast castle (where the first two books take place), nor was the overall story intended to end with the third book. In fact, whilst Titus Groan and Titus Alone link directly with the second book, Gormenghast, there is little in common between the first and third books themselves. And whilst this trilogy will most likely be found in the fantasy section of your local bookstore (though it's more likely you'd have to order it in), it doesn't really involve any of the usual elements of the fantasy genre... there is no magic, no monsters, etc.

Titus Groan introduces us to the Groan family - a decaying dynasty of ruling nobles who reside in the sprawling and near-endless castle of Gormenghast. The story starts with the birth of Titus Groan, heir to the Earlship, and ends with his first birthday. Curiously, despite sharing the novel's name, Titus is not really a major character here - the protagonist is instead Steerpike, a runaway Cook's Apprentice who slowly ingratiates himself with the Groans in his hungry quest for power.

The second novel, Gormenghast, picks up the story a few years down the track and follows Titus Groan through his adolescence as he grows both physically and mentally in preparation for facing off against the Machiavellian Steerpike. This book is on par with the first one.

Titus Alone, the most idiosyncratic of the three novels, doesn't even take place in Gormenghast castle. It's about half the length of the other novels and is about Titus' travels throughout the world outside of Gormenghast - a world that is strangely futuristic and seems to have very little in common with the medieval world Titus has come from. This book is pretty much only about Titus (hence the title) and is, sadly, of inferior quality due to the health problems experienced by the author while he was writing it.

The previous three paragraphs are only very brief synopses of the books. It would actually be unfair to judge these books via any synopsis you find on them as they are about much, much more than just plot. The mechanics of the narrative seem to be ultimately secondary as far as Peake is concerned as he primarily concentrates instead on atmosphere and characterisation. He draws on surrealism, the Gothic, and an almost Dickensian-tradition of the macabre, bizarre, and grotesque. Each character is a ruffling delight of descriptive language and eccentricity - each is written as if they are the protagonist of the story, and it makes for surprising reading as you're never sure where Peake is taking these characters (indeed - it is said that Peake had no real concerns for plotting when he wrote these books, his only rule was to write whatever he felt like writing, and not to get bogged down in silly things like story outlines!)

Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy would have to go down as one of the true classics of the fantasy genre and of literature in general.

I would recommend the first two novels but maybe not the third... it's all too apparent that Peake was losing his faculties when he wrote it if you compare the level of description, characterisation, and length of the book to the previous two. The tone of Titus Alone feels all wrong, everything from the first two books disappears and it all moves in a different direction. I'm not saying it's not interesting or unwarranted, but it's only because of Titus Alone that the series feels very much unfinished - Peake wanted to continue the story of Titus with books called Titus Awake and Gormenghast Revisited but he never got there, so it leaves Titus Alone as a proto-steampunk oddity.

Read Titus Groan and Gormenghast as a self-contained pair of linked novels and you won't be disappointed. They form two halves of a great narrative regarding Steerpike's journey to villainy under the reign of the Groans and there's an amazing host of interesting supporting characters. Get it and get lost in the prose, it's wonderful, and experience firsthand a master of language's love for world-building.  

Book Journeys: Station Eleven

I don't often read new releases and, yes, I count a book printed in 2014 as a relatively new release. I tend to instead spend my time catching up on classics, favourite authors, graphic novels, and the NSW HSC Prescriptions List (No, no, I've never actually claimed to be fun at parties).

Last year I returned to a much-loved hobby, reading while walking. This has led to a strange series of synchronous coincidences in which the weather coincided with my reading experience. In the last four months:

• I read The Shipping News, about life on an island, while walking the coastline of Stanwell Park. 
• Journey to the Stone Country, about the sparse rocky inland of Northern Queensland, read while sweltering in the dry heat of our recent and devastating Australian summer. 
• And then there was Island Home, Tim Winton's nature-inspired memoir of growing up alongside fragile and unsung ecosystems such as the heath-lands of south-west Australia, which I read while walking the semi-developed swamps of Werrington.

Okay, that last one is a stretch, but spare a thought for the romantic in me. 

Less romantic is the COVID-19 pandemic that currently casts a pallid silence over the world. I picked up Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel for no reason other than the fact that I liked the minimalist design of the cover, and metaphorically gasped as I walked my quietening neighbourhood a month ago and came to the realisation that I was reading a post-apocalyptic story that described in scarily accurate detail what the world might look like after a devastating pandemic wipes out the majority of humanity. 

It took me four walks to read Station Eleven from start to finish, and it's the sort of book that made me want to keep on walking. It's a compelling read, with easily-read prose that belies certain complexities. For a start, St. John Mandel (is that the whole last name? I'm never sure) utilises a non-linear structure to encapsulate fifty years of events, four or five protagonists, and layers of meaning that keep you thinking long after the novel has ended. 

In a way this is a book about the importance of art in the face of tragedy and cataclysm. Relevant, huh? In Station Eleven, a single piece of amateur art is used to form the thematic core of the entire narrative; a suggestion that art's relevance is entirely dependent on its significance to the reader. This is further exemplified by the text's equal use of examples from both high culture (Shakespeare, Beethoven) and low culture (the remnants of pop culture that still persist, with the Star Trek: Voyager quote "Survival is insufficient" taking centrestage). The text circles around these ideas and doubles-back in multiple ways, employing dramatic irony ("one day she'll show it to the world and we'll all say we knew her when"), symbolism (the eponymous comic that holds the various threads of the different time periods together), and metatextuality ("You don't have to understand it, it's mine").

It's a beautiful and breathtaking piece of accessible science fiction that asks big questions about religion, survival, art, and humanity. How could anyone say no to that?

Extension English 1: Literary Worlds

Hi students (and teachers!), here you will find materials associated with the Extension English 1 Common Module Literary Worlds, as presented at the Central West HSC Enrichment Seminars at Denison College, in associated with Charles Sturt University.

This is the PPT on Literary Worlds.
This is the booklet of material that goes with the PPT.

Practice makes perfect!

Ergodic Literature

As Term 4 approaches I'm about shoulder-deep in preparing resources for HSC Extension English 1 and enjoying the opportunities afforded by the new syllabus. It's one of those things where the more you look, the more you find, and part of the challenge is in parsing the seemingly infinite bounty of literature that's on offer and figuring out what will work with my particular class when exploring the mandatory Literary Worlds module. There has been some excellent Professional Learning courtesy of the English Teachers Association that I found very helpful, and the networks of hardworking Extension teachers sharing resources on Facebook has been quite a boon as well, but, as with all things, I just can't get my head completely around something until I start trying to do it myself. 

One of the joys of Extension English 1 is that the course is broad enough to allow for a multitude of cautious creepings down various literary back-alleys. One such alleyway that stood out to my sensibilities as a 'must' was ergodic literature. In exploring what a writer does, and how literature is read, the most extreme avenue to travel down must surely be those narratives that require the most effort to read.

What Is It?

The most common definition (and like its grandfather, postmodernism, its a definition that's a little tricky to pin down) is that ergodic literature is any text that requires 'nontrivial effort' to read it. That is to say, beyond reading the words and turning the page, the text will require something extra from the reader if they are to grasp the beginnings of meaning intended by the author (and that intention may even be that meaning is created almost solely by the reader). 

Here is a PPT that contains a more in-depth explanation.

And here are some examples from ergodic texts that students can look at. 

Engaging Students

Okay, so my main reason for doing this with my class is that it'll let me share two of my all-time favourite texts: Building Stories and Riddley Walker. 

Building Stories - the box

Building Stories by Chris Ware is a unique graphic novel that comes in an A3-sized box. Within this box are 14 different texts in a range of mediums - newspaper, comics, pamphlet, cloth book, flip book - with no specified order for them to be read in. Most intriguingly, there is a map of a house that seems to indicate where each of the texts should or can be read. For example, one comic is to be read in the kitchen, so I read that one while having breakfast. Another text is linked to the bedroom, one to an armchair, etc, etc.

Note the schematic - this seems to indicate which part of a house links to each of the specific texts within the box

All 14 texts - I had to step back a fair way to fit them all in one photo!

Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker appears to be more like a regular novel on the surface. It's a comparatively slim post-apocalyptic text set out in the traditional fashion, however, where the reader has to do some work is in translating the first person narrative's invented dialect into something more identifiable. In setting his story set far into a post-nuclear future devoid of technology, Hoban has constructed a version of the English language that has distorted and disintegrated over time. Some words remain the same, some words are recognisable with a little work from the reader, and some words are maddeningly obscure and enigmatic in meaning. What's great about Riddley Walker is that the more you read of it the more meaning you begin to glean from the text - essentially because the reader, with concentration, becomes increasingly fluent in this new dialect.

After introducing these two texts to the class the next step is to let the students engage with them. I've selected two relatively-easy extracts from Riddley Walker, the opening page and a section in which the oft-mentioned mythical figure 'Eusa' seems to join the text as a speaking character, with the intention for students to read and then discuss what some of the words might mean.

Extracts here.

Independent Response
After students have been taken on this little tour of the ergodic genre the next step is to consolidate their thinking. Coming about six lessons or so into a look at the Literary Worlds module, the intention is that students should be familiar with a few different literary theories about reading by this point. I'll blog more about this at a later point, but the key ideas I want them to think about are:

• The text is the message (this is the traditional, formalist approach to reading).
• The reader creates the message in conversation with the author.
• The author's intentions are irrelevant as they cannot control what or how the reader reads.
• There is no single message in a text - the shifting nature of context changes what is read.
• Reading is a 'community' act - our literary competence comes with our experience of how literature is interpreted by others. 

So, with all this in mind, students should have a bit of time discussing and reflecting on ergodic texts before responding to the following question with a paragraph-length response:

Why would an author choose to write ergodic literature?

Which should give scope for a range of responses and, at the very least, let students start to iterate what they're thinking.