Audience imperatives

Audience imperatives encompass the intended recipients of a text or performance, encompassing characteristics, impact, and desired responses, such as humour, sensitivity, critical perspective, appreciation, empathy, antipathy, sympathy, aesthetics, mood, atmosphere, and gender perspectives.

Character

Character representation within narrative and dramatic works involves direct methods, describing or commenting on qualities, and indirect methods that prompt readers to infer qualities from characters’ actions, speech, or appearance.

Exploring the concept of character involves transformations, influences, conflicts, protagonists, antagonists, personas, foils, and stock characters.

Context

Context refers to the social, historical, cultural, and workplace settings in which a text or work is created. Texts are understood through their form, content, purpose, audience, and the contexts that produce and value them. Literary texts are influenced by social context, cultural heritage, and historical change, shaping and transforming inherited literary and cultural traditions.

Cultural context pertains to the customs, beliefs, and ways of life of specific groups at particular times.

Genres

Genres are categories in literature or film marked by shared features or conventions. Conventions are genre characteristics that may differ across languages, including techniques used by writers to achieve artistic aims.

Understanding genres involves recognizing conventions in form, style, storyline, characterization, tone, mood, atmosphere, register, visual imagery, layout, narrative/storytelling, prose, poetry, drama, mythology, fiction, and non-fiction.

Examples of drama conventions encompass dialogues, speeches, monologues, soliloquies, asides, stage directions, voice, movement, gesture, space usage, costume, props, lighting, set, and sound.

Intertextuality

Intertextuality refers to connections between texts and the meanings derived from their relationships, including overt references or direct quotes from other texts.

Point of view

Point of view represents the particular perspective brought by a composer, responder, or character within a text, influencing the presentation of events and considerations of positioning, voice, and tone.

Purpose

Purpose in literature refers to the creator’s intentions in producing a text, encompassing meaning, thesis/argument, gender, age, bias, persuasive techniques, function, critical stance, message, and culture.

Self-expression

Self-expression involves conveying feelings, thoughts, or ideas in writing, art, music, dance, design, and film, exploring identity, personal voice, inspiration, imagination, sensitivity, critical stance, and process.

Setting

Setting denotes the time, place, mood, and atmosphere where the action occurs in a book, film, or play.

Structure

Structure involves how a piece of writing is assembled, examining meter patterns, stanza arrangement, idea development, plot, narrative, discourse, form, transformation, thesis/argument, syntax, foreshadowing, and flashbacks.

Style

Style refers to a writer’s characteristic use of linguistic and literary devices for specific purposes and effects, including word choice, sentence structure, figurative language, repetition, motif, allusion, imagery, and symbolism.

Theme

Theme represents the central ideas explored by a creator through a text.