HSC Standard and Advanced English, Area of Study

 

Romulus my Father

The Area of Study, Belonging, requires that you develop a complex understanding of the concept of belonging. You must be able to recognise belonging in texts and you must be able to write about belonging in analytical and creative responses.

The core text we will study is Raimond Gaita’s Romulus, My Father. This is a biographical memoir written by the first generation Australian author about his family and their migration to Australia. The book exploits a wide range of language features to convey a sense of belonging that is poignant, candid and multi-faceted. There is, for instance, a strong authorial voice, authentic language, the symbolism of landscape, food, traditional and popular culture etc. and a relentless narrative drive. When you write about this text you will do well to distinguish between the authorial persona and the main character and between the characters and the people they represent. The story of Romulus and is family is quite accessible but, because it so easy to read, many students fall into the trap of recounting the family’s experience of belonging without providing any textual analysis. Try to remember that the only person who experiences ‘belonging’ when you read the book is you – there are no people in the book, just characters.

You will need at least two related texts in addition to Romulus, My Father. Ideally, these texts should represent a complex concept of belonging that is in some way similar to that represented by Gaita. If, for instance, you are convinced that narrator’s ethnicity gives him a strong sense of belonging to family that also challenges his cultural identity, then you should find something similar in your related text. If you would like to explore the way that the dysfunctional family described in the text actually brings some of the family members closer together, then your related text should also explore something comparable. If, on the other hand, you would like to explore the way that the memoir operates as a means by which an author can reclaim the past and therefore find a sense of belonging in it that can be conveyed to an audience, then you need to find a text that operates in a similar way. The texts you choose should have textual complexity. Even if the text has a strong and complex notion of belonging at its centre, you will not be able to write an essay that scores well on the “understands how composers create meaning” bullet point if you have no techniques to discuss. If you choose Billy Ray Cyrus’ “Don’t Break My Heart, My Achy Breaky Heart”, for instance, you will be able to recount a situation in which a composer fears the breaking of a heart that is already, adverbially, broken, but you will have no techniques to discuss other than a boot-scooting beat. Do not write about song lyrics. You need texts that allow you to discuss the textual representation of complex and related concepts of belonging. Choose a number of complex text – the advice is usually to choose texts of varied types so that you will be able to demonstrate a broad scope of analysis.