Year 11 English Extension 1
Our goal for this unit is to explore the nature of human duality, with a primary focus on Victorian literature. The core texts of The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and The Picture of Dorian Gray will form the basis for our study, as students examine how duality, human weakness, repression, deviance, spiritual decay, hedonism and the search for individual identity, are universal concerns that continue to be explored in literature. In reading and analysing these two texts as well as a range of extracts from modern iterations, adaptations and appropriations of these source texts students will develop a deeper understanding of how cultural values of rationality, self-control, personal insight, responsibility and acceptance are represented, affirmed or challenged in literature. This in turn will lead to a deeper understanding of the role of literature in shifting cultural norms through representations that are counternormative, controversial and strange to contemporary audiences. Implicit in this idea is an understanding that literature imagines the new through representation of otherness when mass culture and social sameness attempts to silence difference.
Prescribed Texts: Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
Our Goals this Year
Our goal for this course is to explore the relationship between texts and their respective cultures. Specifically, students will consider how language shapes and reflects contextual values and why a text might be valued both at its time of inception and throughout successive generations. Students will also extend their use of language in creative and critical ways.
We will achieve this goal by analysing how representation of duality, repression, identity, deviance, spiritual decay and hedonism raise concerns rationality, morality, responsibility and self-awareness have been repeatedly borrowed and appropriated over time so that they reside in the collective consciousness. In addition, students will develop their research skills through the completion of an independent research project.
We have this goal because it allows students to explore and evaluate multiple meanings and relative values of texts. Further, it develops an awareness of the assumptions that guide interpretation and evaluation. Finally, this goal encourages students to question canonicity and to evaluate the extent to which texts challenge or affirm hegemony.
