Year 11 English Extension 

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