Free QCE English & Literature Extension Flashcard Review

A system of beliefs, values, and assumptions—often implicit—that shapes how a text represents reality and whose interests it serves. Ideologies are naturalised in texts through language choices, narrative structure, and characterisation. Literary analysis exposes the ideological work texts perform.

A system of language and representation that constructs meaning and power relations. Discourses organise knowledge, establish what can be 'said' or 'known,' and regulate social practices. Literary texts both participate in dominant discourses and can resist or subvert them.

The implied reader is the reader constructed by the text through its language, assumptions, and address. Identifying the implied reader reveals the text's ideological positioning and how it works to position subjects in relation to meaning and power.

A literary technique that makes the familiar strange or unfamiliar, disrupting habitual ways of seeing. Often associated with Russian Formalism (Viktor Shklovsky), defamiliarisation forces readers to perceive anew, resisting ideological naturalisation and encouraging critical consciousness.

Hegemony (Gramsci) is the dominance of one group's ideology, maintained through consent and cultural production rather than force alone. Texts participate in hegemonic struggle—they can reinforce dominant worldviews or challenge them. Literary analysis reveals how texts normalise or contest hegemonic power relations.

Subaltern refers to groups subordinated within hegemonic power structures—colonised peoples, marginalised populations, or voices silenced by dominant discourse. Gayatri Spivak's 'Can the Subaltern Speak?' asks whether subordinated voices can be represented or heard.

The presence of one text within another through quotation, allusion, or structural reference. Intertextuality reveals how meanings are constructed through relationships between texts and how literary traditions are built, contested, or reimagined.

Focalisation (Genette) refers to whose perspective filters the narrative—whose knowledge, perceptions, and values shape what readers see and understand. Unlike point of view (first/third person), focalisation concerns the character or narrator whose consciousness determines narrative information.

Bakhtin's term for the coexistence of multiple voices, languages, and perspectives within a single text. Heteroglossia resists monologic authority; different discourses, dialects, or ideologies clash and interanimate. Novels exhibit heteroglossia through dialogue, different characters' speech registers, and competing viewpoints.

A lens or framework through which to read and analyse texts. The four orientations are: Marxist (power, ideology, class), feminist (gender, patriarchy, representation), postcolonial (colonialism, othering, subaltern), and psychoanalytic (unconscious, desire, subjectivity).

Marxist criticism examines how texts reflect, construct, and contest class relations and economic power. Key terms: ideology, hegemony, base/superstructure, false consciousness, alienation. Analysis reveals whose interests texts serve and how they naturalise economic hierarchies.

Feminist criticism interrogates gender representation, patriarchal ideology, and women's voices in texts. It examines: female characterisation, gendered language, male/female authorship, reproductive/domestic labour, and whose perspectives are centred.

Postcolonial criticism examines representations of colonised peoples and colonial power relations in literature. Key concerns: Orientalism (Said), othering, resistance, hybridity, and recovery of subaltern voices. It critiques how colonial texts naturalise imperialism.

Psychoanalytic criticism applies Freudian and Lacanian concepts: the unconscious, desire, repression, the id/ego/superego, the Other, lack. It reads textual patterns (symbols, dreams, gaps) as manifestations of unconscious processes in both text and reader.

Poetry's formal properties (metre, rhyme, line breaks, enjambment, sound devices) carry meaning and shape emotional/intellectual effects. Close reading attends to: sonic texture, stanzaic structure, volta, imagery patterns, and how form reinforces or contests content.

Prose features include: narrative structure and pacing, sentence construction (syntax, complexity), focalisation and point of view, dialogue and speech registers, characterisation (direct/indirect), symbolism, and tone.

Drama analysis considers: dialogue and subtext, stage directions, dramatic irony and tension, character interaction and power dynamics, temporal/spatial structure, dramatic conventions (soliloquy, asides), and visual symbolism.

A transformation is the rewriting or reinterpretation of a source text from a new perspective, context, or theoretical lens. It is argumentative because it must demonstrate a specific insight about the source text—showing how altered form, focalisation, or narrative voice reveals previously obscured meanings.

A strong transformation: (1) identifies a specific textual problem or unstated implication in the source; (2) uses formal/stylistic choices (genre shift, focalisation change, intertextual reference) to foreground that problem; (3) sustains the argument across the transformation; (4) avoids mere pastiche.

Justification involves: (1) making explicit the interpretive claim your transformation enacts; (2) citing specific textual evidence from both source and transformation; (3) demonstrating how formal choices (word choice, perspective, structure) enact that claim; (4) articulating what the transformation reveals.