HSC English Extension 1 (NSW) flashcards

32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.

Literary world

The internally consistent construction of place, time, social order and value produced by a text's language choices, which readers infer from detail, convention and omission.

Verisimilitude

The effect of reality produced by dense, specific and consistent mimetic detail; a constructed effect rather than a property of the subject matter being described.

Diegetic level

The narrative layer in which events occur; embedded levels appear when a character narrates a story within the primary world, and shifts between levels are analysable structures.

Focalisation

The perspective through which a world is perceived, distinguished from the voice that narrates it; it determines whose knowledge and interiority the reader can access.

Defamiliarisation

A technique that makes the familiar strange so it can be perceived anew, used by alternative and speculative worlds to provoke critical recognition of the reader's own reality.

Chronotope

The fusion of time and space in narrative, such as the road, the threshold or the salon, which organises how a constructed world structures experience and movement.

Heteroglossia

The coexistence of multiple social voices, dialects and registers within a single text, signalling the social texture and power relations of the constructed world.

World-building through omission

The construction of a world through what is left unrepresented or unexplained; absences of groups, histories or explanations are as analysable as inclusions.

Modality of a world

A text's contract with the reader about what is possible within it, ranging from realist through allegorical and fantastic to speculative modes.

Homeland as construction

The idea that homeland is produced through memory, language, community and narrative rather than being a fixed territory, so texts define it differently.

Diaspora

A dispersed community that retains collective memory of an original homeland and maintains connection to it across distance and generations.

Hybridity

The mixing of cultural forms and identities at the contact zone, producing new cultural formations rather than simply the loss of an original homeland.

Code-switching

The alternation between languages or dialects within a text, signalling intimacy, exclusion, resistance or the divided self of the migrant speaker.

Inherited memory

Memory of a homeland known only through family story, characteristic of second- and third-generation narratives where the place itself has not been experienced.

Nostalgia versus memory

Nostalgia idealises an irrecoverable past, whereas memory may be critical, contested or inherited; the distinction sharpens analysis of homeland narratives.

Sovereignty and Country

In Indigenous contexts, continuing political authority and connection to Country, which is not reducible to land ownership, nostalgia or arrival narratives.

Displacement in form

The enactment of dislocation through disrupted chronology, untranslated language, fragmented syntax or non-linear structure, so that form carries the migrant experience.

Worlds of upheaval

Texts representing rupture in political, social or cosmic order, where analysis identifies the order destabilised and the agent of its destabilisation.

Dystopia

A depiction of an already-established oppressive order sustained by surveillance, ideology or coercion, distinct from apocalypse, which depicts the collapse itself.

Apocalyptic threshold

The rupture event dividing before from after in a catastrophe narrative; it is often unnarrated or displaced, and that absence is itself significant.

Liminality

The threshold condition between established orders, a state of ambiguity and transition that upheaval narratives repeatedly dramatise in characters and settings.

Anomie

The breakdown of shared norms and values under social stress, a concept useful for analysing communities in post-crisis and revolutionary worlds.

Testimony and witnessing

The ethical framing of catastrophe through who testifies, to whom, and what the implied addressee suggests about the possibility of repair or justice.

Rhetoric of crisis

The verbal construction of urgency through present tense, short clauses, lists, repetition and rhetorical questions, producing the felt experience of instability.

Contested historiography

The struggle over who records catastrophe and which accounts are authorised, a recurring concern in upheaval texts that interrogate official memory.

Reimagined worlds

Speculative, fantastic or adaptive texts that transform inherited worlds or invent alternatives, using difference from actuality to interrogate actuality.

Cognitive estrangement

A mode pairing rational explanation with an unfamiliar world, distinguishing speculative fiction from fantasy and enabling critique of the reader's own reality.

Extrapolation

The disciplined development of consequences from a stated speculative premise, producing the internal consistency that makes an alternative world credible.

Magical realism

A mode integrating supernatural events as ordinary within a realist setting, frequently used to represent suppressed histories and postcolonial realities.

Appropriation

The deliberate reworking of a source text into a new cultural or historical context, distinguished from adaptation's emphasis on transferring medium.

Uchronia

An alternative history narrative; identifying its point of divergence from actual history clarifies the text's argument about the recorded past.

Invented language

Neologisms, invented dialects or altered registers that build an alternative world's plausibility and often encode its social hierarchies and exclusions.