Area of Study 2015–18: Standard and Advanced
Students explore the concept of discovery through at least one of the following:
Prose fiction (pf) or nonfiction (nf)
• Bradley, James, Wrack (pf)
• Chopin, Kate, The Awakening (pf)
• Winch, Tara June, Swallow the Air (pf)
• Bryson, Bill, A Short History of Nearly Everything (nf)
• Guevara, Ernesto ‘Che’, The Motorcycle Diaries (nf)
or
Drama (d) or film (f) or Shakespearean drama (S)
• Gow, Michael, Away (d)
• Harrison, Jane, Rainbow’s End from Cleven, Vivienne et al, Contemporary Indigenous Plays (d)
• Lee, Ang, Life of Pi (f)
• Shakespeare, William, The Tempest (d/S*)
* In order to satisfy the text requirements of the different English courses, The Tempest is classified as a drama text
for the Standard course and as a Shakespearean drama text for the Advanced course.
or
Poetry
• Dobson, Rosemary
‘Young Girl at a Window’, ‘Wonder’, ‘Painter of Antwerp’, ‘Traveller’s Tale’, ‘The Tiger’, ‘Cock Crow’,
‘Ghost Town: New England’
• Frost, Robert
‘The Tuft of Flowers’, ‘Mending Wall’, ‘Home Burial’, ‘After Apple-Picking’, ‘Fire and Ice’,
‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’
• Gray, Robert
‘Journey: the North Coast’, ‘The Meatworks’, ‘North Coast Town’, ‘Late Ferry’,
‘Flames and Dangling Wire’, ‘Diptych’
or
Media
• Nasht, Simon, Frank Hurley – The Man Who Made History
• O’Mahoney, Ivan, Go Back to Where You Came From – Series 1, Episodes 1, 2 and 3
and The Response
Standard, Module A: Experience Through Language
Elective 2: Distinctively Visual
In their responding and composing, students explore the ways the images we see and/or visualise
in texts are created. Students consider how the forms, features and language of different texts create
these images, affect interpretation and shape meaning. Students examine one prescribed text, in
addition to other related texts of their own choosing that provide examples of the distinctively visual.
Students will choose one of the following texts as the basis for their further exploration of the elective
Distinctively Visual.
Prose fiction
• Lawson, Henry
‘The Drover’s Wife’, ‘The Bush Undertaker’, ‘In a Dry Season’, ‘The Loaded Dog’
• Lohrey, Amanda, Vertigo
or
Drama
• Misto, John, The Shoe-Horn Sonata
or
Poetry
• Stewart, Douglas
‘Lady Feeding the Cats’, ‘Wombat’, ‘The Snow-Gum’, ‘Nesting Time’, ‘The Moths’, ‘The Fireflies’,
‘Waterlily’, ‘Cave Painting’
or
Film
• Lee, Ang, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
• Tykwer, Tom, Run Lola Run
Standard, Module B: Close Study of Text
Students choose one text from one of the listed types of text.
Prose fiction
• Day, Marele, The Life and Crimes of Harry Lavender
• Haddon, Mark, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time
or
Drama
• Rankin, Scott, Namatjira
• Shakespeare, William, The Merchant of Venice
or
Poetry
Students choose one of the following poets for study. All listed poems for that poet constitute the
prescribed text.
• Noonuccal, Oodgeroo
‘Municipal Gum’, ‘Artist Son’, ‘The Past’, ‘China…Woman’, ‘Reed Flute Cave’, ‘Entombed Warriors’,
‘Visit to Sun Yat-Sen Memorial Hall’
• Owen, Wilfred
‘The Next War’, ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, ‘Dulce Et Decorum Est’, ‘Insensibility’, ‘Futility’,
‘Strange Meeting’
or
Nonfiction (nf) or film (f) or multimedia (mm)
• Funder, Anna, Stasiland (nf)
• Howard, Ron, A Beautiful Mind (f)
• Australian War Memorial website (mm)
Standard, Module C: Texts and Society
Elective 1: Exploring Interactions
In this elective, students explore and analyse a variety of texts that portray the ways in which individuals
live, interact and communicate in a range of social contexts. These contexts may include the home,
cultural, friendship and sporting groups, the workplace and the digital world. Through exploring their
prescribed text and texts of their own choosing, students consider how acts of communication can
shape, challenge or transform attitudes and beliefs, identities and behaviours. In their responding and
composing, students develop their understanding of how the social context of individuals’ interactions
can affect perceptions of ourselves and others, relationships and society.
Students will choose one of the following texts as the basis for their further exploration of this elective.
Prose fiction
• Anderson, MT, Feed
or
Drama
• Enright, Nick, A Man with Five Children
• Miller, Arthur, All My Sons
or
Poetry
• Watson, Ken (ed), The Round Earth’s Imagined Corners
Sujata Bhatt, ‘The Stare’; Carol Ann Duffy, ‘Head of English’, ‘Yes, Officer’;
UA Fanthorpe, ‘Reports’, ‘Not My Best Side’; Gwyneth Lewis, ‘Peripheral Vision’, ‘Good Dog!’
or
Nonfiction (nf) or film (f)
• Gaita, Raimond, Romulus, My Father (nf)
• Down, Elissa, The Black Balloon (f)
Elective 2: Exploring Transitions
In this elective, students explore and analyse a variety of texts that portray the ways in which individuals
experience transitions into new phases of life and social contexts. These transitions may be challenging,
confronting, exciting or transformative and may result in growth, change and a range of consequences
for the individual and others. Through exploring their prescribed text and other related texts of their own
choosing, students consider how transitions can result in new knowledge and ideas, shifts in attitudes and
beliefs, and a deepened understanding of the self and others. Students respond to and compose a range
of texts that expand our understanding of the experience of venturing into new worlds.
Students will choose one of the following texts as the basis for their further exploration of this elective.
Prose fiction
• Burke, JC, The Story of Tom Brennan
or
Drama
• Russell, Willy, Educating Rita
• Valentine, Alana, Shafana and Aunt Sarrinah
or
Poetry
• Herrick, Steven, The Simple Gift
or
Nonfiction (nf) or film (f)
• Pung, Alice, Unpolished Gem (nf)
• Daldry, Stephen, Billy Elliot (f)
Elective 1: Intertextual Connections
In this elective, students compare texts in order to develop their understanding of the effects of context,
purpose and audience on the shaping of meaning. Through exploring the intertextual connections
between a pair of texts, students examine the ways in which different social, cultural and historical
contexts can influence the composer’s choice of language forms and features and the ideas, values
and attitudes conveyed in each text. In their responding and composing, students consider how the
implicit and explicit relationship between the texts can deepen our understanding of the values,
significance and context of each.
Students choose a pair of texts from the following list:
Shakespearean drama and film
• Shakespeare, William, King Richard III
AND
• Pacino, Al, Looking for Richard
or
Prose fiction and film
• Woolf, Virginia, Mrs Dalloway
AND
• Daldry, Stephen, The Hours
or
Prose fiction and nonfiction
• Austen, Jane, Pride and Prejudice
AND
• Weldon, Fay, Letters to Alice on First Reading Jane Austen
or
Poetry and prose fiction
• Tennyson, Alfred Lord
‘The Lady of Shalott’, ‘Tears, idle tears’, ‘In Memoriam A.H.H.’ – Cantos XVI, XVII, XVIII, XIX
AND
• Anderson, Jessica, Tirra Lirra by the River
Shakespearean drama and nonfiction
• Shakespeare, William, Julius Caesar
AND
• Machiavelli, Niccolò, The Prince (translated by Tim Parks)
or
Prose fiction and poetry
• Fitzgerald, F Scott, The Great Gatsby
AND
• Browning, Elizabeth Barrett
Sonnets from the Portuguese – I, XIII, XIV, XXI, XXII, XXVIII, XXXII, XLIII
or
Prose fiction and poetry
• Joyce, James, Dubliners
AND
• Heaney, Seamus
‘Digging’, ‘Blackberry-Picking’, ‘Mid-Term Break’, ‘The Given Note’, ‘The Strand at Lough Beg’,
‘Casualty’, ‘Granite Chip’, ‘Clearances III’
or
Prose fiction and film
• Orwell, George, Nineteen Eighty-Four
AND
• Lang, Fritz, Metropolis
Shakespearean drama
• Shakespeare, William, Hamlet
or
Prose fiction
• Brontë, Charlotte, Jane Eyre
• Jones, Gail, Sixty Lights
• Ondaatje, Michael, In the Skin of a Lion
• Winton, Tim, Cloudstreet
or
Drama (d) or film (f)
• Chekhov, Anton, The Seagull (d) (translated by Stephen Mulrine)
• Welles, Orson, Citizen Kane (f)
or
Poetry
Students choose one of the following poets for study. All listed poems for that poet constitute the
prescribed text.
• Eliot, TS
‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’, ‘Preludes’, ‘Rhapsody on a Windy Night’, ‘The Hollow Men’,
‘Journey of the Magi’
• Rossetti, Christina
‘Goblin Market’, ‘After Death’, ‘Maude Clare’, ‘Light Love’, ‘L.E.L.’, ‘In an Artist’s Studio’
• Yeats, William Butler
‘When You Are Old’, ‘The Wild Swans at Coole’, ‘An Irish Airman Foresees his Death’, ‘Easter 1916’,
‘The Second Coming’, ‘Leda and the Swan’, ‘Among School Children’
Nonfiction
• Woolf, Virginia, A Room of One’s Own AND Three Guineas
• Speeches:
Anwar Sadat – Speech to the Israeli Knesset, 1977
Paul Keating – Redfern Speech, 1992
Margaret Atwood – ‘Spotty-Handed Villainesses’, 1994
Noel Pearson – ‘An Australian history for us all’, 1996
William Deane – ‘It is still winter at home’, 1999
Doris Lessing – ‘On not winning the Nobel Prize’, Nobel Lecture, 2007
Geraldine Brooks – ‘A Home in Fiction’, Boyer Lecture 4, 2011
Shakespearean drama
• Shakespeare, William, King Henry IV, Part 1
or
Prose fiction
• Huxley, Aldous, Brave New World
or
Drama (d) or film (f)
• Miller, Arthur, The Crucible (d)
• Levinson, Barry, Wag the Dog (f)
or
Poetry
• Auden, WH
‘O what is that sound which so thrills the ear’, ‘Spain’, ‘Epitaph on a Tyrant’, ‘In Memory of
W.B. Yeats’, ‘September 1, 1939’, ‘The Unknown Citizen’, ‘The Shield of Achilles’
or
Nonfiction
• Reynolds, Henry, Why Weren’t We Told?
Prose fiction
• Harrison, Melissa, Clay
• Tóibín, Colm, Brooklyn
• White, Patrick, The Tree of Man
or
Film
• de Heer, Rolf, Ten Canoes
or
Poetry
• Wright, Judith
‘The Hawthorn Hedge’, ‘Brothers and Sisters’, ‘South of My Days’, ‘For New England’,
‘Flame-tree in a Quarry’, ‘Train Journey’, ‘Moving South’
or
Nonfiction
• de Botton, Alain, The Art of Travel
ESL prescribed texts
Prose fiction
• Baillie, Allan, The China Coin
• Bradbury, Ray, Fahrenheit 451
• Lahiri, Jhumpa, The Namesake
• Winch, Tara June, Swallow the Air
or
Drama
• Harrison, Jane, Rainbow’s End from Cleven, Vivienne et al, Contemporary Indigenous Plays
• Thomson, Katherine, Navigating
or
Poetry
• Frost, Robert
‘The Tuft of Flowers’, ‘Mending Wall’, ‘Home Burial’, ‘After Apple-Picking’, ‘The Road Not Taken’,
‘Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening’, ‘A Boundless Moment’
• Noonuccal, Oodgeroo
‘Last of His Tribe’, ‘Acacia Ridge’, ‘Municipal Gum’, ‘Son of Mine’, ‘Understand, Old One’,
‘We Are Going’, ‘The Past’
• Watson, Ken (ed), The Round Earth’s Imagined Corners
Sujata Bhatt, ‘The Stare’; Nina Cassian, ‘Evolution’; Carol Ann Duffy, ‘Originally’;
Miroslav Holub, ’Brief Reflection on Accuracy’, ‘Brief Reflection on Test-Tubes’;
Gwyneth Lewis, ’The Reference Library’
Film (f) or media (m)
• Daldry, Stephen, Billy Elliot (f)
• Kubrick, Stanley, 2001: A Space Odyssey (f)
• O’Mahoney, Ivan, Go Back to Where You Came From – Series 1, Episodes 1, 2 and 3
and The Response (m)
• Welles, Orson, War of the Worlds (m)
Prose fiction
• Burke, JC, The Story of Tom Brennan
or
Drama
• Lawler, Ray, Summer of the Seventeenth Doll
or
Poetry
• Komninos
‘back to melbourne’, ‘hillston welcome’, ‘cobar, july 1993’, ‘eat’, ‘noura from narooma’,
‘thomastown talk’
or
Nonfiction
• Bird, Carmel (ed), The Stolen Children – Their Stories
or
Film
• Perkins, Rachel, One Night the Moon
• Sitch, Rob, The Castle
Prose fiction
• Malouf, David, Fly Away Peter
or
Drama
• Misto, John, The Shoe-Horn Sonata
or
Poetry
• Stewart, Douglas
‘Lady Feeding the Cats’, ‘Wombat’, ‘The Snow-Gum’, ‘Nesting Time’, ‘The Moths’, ‘The Fireflies’,
‘Waterlily’, ‘Cave Painting’, ‘The Tailor Fishermen’
or
Nonfiction
• Gaita, Raimond, Romulus, My Father
or
Film
• Down, Elissa, The Black Balloon
EE1 prescribed texts
Poetry
• Lowell, Robert
‘Grandparents’, ‘Commander Lowell’, ‘Terminal Days at Beverly Farms’, ‘Sailing Home from Rapallo’,
‘Waking in the Blue’, ‘Memories of West Street and Lepke’, ‘Man and Wife’, ‘Skunk Hour’
Nonfiction
• de Waal, Edmund, The Hare with Amber Eyes
• Modjeska, Drusilla, The Orchard
• Nabokov, Vladimir, Speak, Memory
Media
• Armstrong, Gillian, Unfolding Florence
Prose fiction
• Fforde, Jasper, The Eyre Affair
• Swift, Jonathan, Gulliver’s Travels
Drama
• Aristophanes, Lysistrata
• Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, The School for Scandal
Media
• Curtis, Richard and Elton, Ben, Blackadder The Third (Remastered) – Episodes 1, 2, 3 and 4
Prose fiction
• Gibson, William, Neuromancer
• Herbert, Frank, Dune
• Le Guin, Ursula, The Left Hand of Darkness
Film
• Parisot, Dean, Galaxy Quest
OR
• Scott, Ridley, Blade Runner – The Director’s Cut
Prose fiction
• Ishiguro, Kazuo, An Artist of the Floating World
• Le Carré, John, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
Drama
• Beckett, Samuel, Waiting for Godot
Poetry
• Plath, Sylvia
‘Morning Song’, ‘The Applicant’, ‘Lady Lazarus’, ‘Daddy’, ‘Fever 103°’, ‘The Arrival of the Bee Box’,
‘Words’
Film
• Clooney, George, Good Night, and Good Luck
Prose fiction
• Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein
Poetry
• Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
‘This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison’, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (1834), ‘Frost at Midnight’,
‘Kubla Khan’
• Wordsworth, William
‘Simon Lee, the Old Huntsman’, ‘Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey’, ‘My heart leaps
up when I behold’, ‘The world is too much with us’, ‘It is a beauteous Evening, calm and free’,
‘Composed Upon Westminster Bridge’, Ode (‘There was a time’), ‘Surprized by joy – impatient
as the Wind’, ‘The Prelude’ (1805) – Book One, lines 1–54, 271–441; Book Five, lines 389–413;
Book Six, lines 491–542
Nonfiction
• Wollstonecraft, Mary, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman – Chapters I, II, III, IV, VIII, IX, XIII
Film
• Campion, Jane, Bright StarProse fiction
• Adiga, Aravind, The White Tiger
• Miller, Alex, Journey to the Stone Country
Poetry
• Levertov, Denise
‘What Were They Like?’, ‘The Sun Going Down upon Our Wrath’, ‘The Malice of Innocence’,
‘A Place of Kindness’, ‘The Life of Others’, ‘What It Could Be’, ‘Talk in the Dark’
Film or media
• Coppola, Sofia, Lost in Translation (f)
OR
• Reeve, Simon, Tropic of Cancer (m)
Prose fiction
• Calvino, Italo, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller
• Coetzee, JM, Summertime
• Dessaix, Robert, Night Letters
Poetry
• Stevens, Wallace
‘The Snow Man’, ‘A High-Toned Old Christian Woman’, ‘Sunday Morning’,
‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’, ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’, ‘Of Modern Poetry’,
‘Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour’
Film
• Potter, Sally, Orlando
Prose fiction
• Malouf, David, An Imaginary Life
• Woolf, Virginia, Orlando
Drama
• Shakespeare, William, Twelfth Night
Poetry
• Tranter, John, The Floor of Heaven
Film
• Kapur, Shekhar, Elizabeth
Source:
http://www.boardofstudies.nsw.edu.au/syllabus_hsc/pdf_doc/english-prescriptions-2015-20.pdf page 36-46 has alphabeticalised list of prescribed texts.