QCAA English & Literature Extension flashcards
QCAA English & Literature Extension · Build recall with a focused review session.
32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.
- Thesis statement
- A concise, contestable claim about what a text means and how it means it. It organises the whole analytical response and must be provable with textual evidence rather than restating the topic.
- Close reading
- Sustained analysis of a short passage that names specific language techniques, explains their effect on the reader, and connects that effect to the text's wider themes and concerns.
- Metalanguage
- The specialised vocabulary used to describe how texts are constructed, such as narrative voice, focalisation, motif, juxtaposition and dramatic irony. It enables precise rather than impressionistic analysis.
- Unreliable narrator
- A narrator whose account is compromised by limited knowledge, self-interest, naivety or psychological instability, so the reader must infer meaning that the narration itself withholds or distorts.
- Free indirect discourse
- A technique blending third-person narration with a character's idiom and attitudes without quotation marks, producing closeness to the character while retaining an external narrative perspective.
- Dramatic irony
- A gap between what a character understands and what the audience or reader knows, generating tension, pathos or satire depending on how the gap is managed.
- Motif
- A recurring image, phrase or situation that accumulates meaning across a text, allowing the work to develop themes through pattern rather than explicit statement.
- Juxtaposition
- Placing two images, characters or scenes side by side so that contrast produces meaning neither element carries alone. The analytical work lies in explaining that produced meaning.
- Focalisation
- The perspective through which narrative information is filtered. Distinct from voice: voice asks who speaks, focalisation asks whose perception and knowledge limit what is shown.
- Mise-en-scène
- Everything placed within the frame of a film or stage image, including setting, costume, lighting, blocking and props. It communicates meaning before dialogue is spoken.
- Soliloquy
- A speech delivered alone on stage in which a character articulates interior thought. It grants the audience access to motive unavailable to other characters in the drama.
- Intertextuality
- The shaping of a text's meaning by other texts through allusion, quotation, parody or genre convention. Analysis identifies the reference and explains what the borrowing changes.
- Context of production
- The historical, social and ideological circumstances in which a text was made. It explains likely pressures on the author but never replaces evidence drawn from the text itself.
- Context of reception
- The circumstances in which audiences read or view a text, including changing values over time. It explains why interpretations of the same text diverge across periods and communities.
- Claim-evidence-analysis
- The three-part unit of an analytical paragraph: a specific assertion, a referenced quotation or example, then explanation of how the evidence supports the assertion and why it matters.
- Comparative frame
- The shared theme, question or problem that organises a comparative response and makes each point of similarity or difference analytically significant rather than merely listed.
- Comparative connective
- A word or phrase such as 'whereas', 'similarly' or 'by contrast' that explicitly states the relationship between two texts. It converts juxtaposition into analysis.
- Feminist lens
- A reading strategy asking how gender is constructed, whose gaze organises the text, and how power relations between genders are reproduced, resisted or complicated by its representation.
- Marxist lens
- A reading strategy examining how economic relations, class position and ideology shape a text's representation of work, wealth, institutions and social conflict.
- Postcolonial lens
- A reading strategy analysing empire, colonisation and their legacies, attending to representation of the colonised, language and power, hybrid identity and resistance to dominant narratives.
- Psychoanalytic lens
- A reading strategy drawing on concepts of desire, repression and the unconscious to interpret character motivation, recurrent imagery and the text's handling of anxiety and taboo.
- Ecocritical lens
- A reading strategy examining how a text represents the natural world, human responsibility toward environments, and the assumptions that separate culture from nature.
- Reader-response lens
- A reading strategy treating meaning as produced in the transaction between text and reader, attending to gaps, expectations and the interpretive community a reader belongs to.
- Queer lens
- A reading strategy interrogating normative assumptions about sexuality and identity, examining how texts disrupt or reinforce categories of desire and gendered behaviour.
- Research question
- An arguable, text-anchored question answerable within the word limit. It must invite interpretation rather than summary and should be refined as evidence is gathered.
- Source authority
- The assessed credibility of a source based on the author's expertise, peer review, publication venue and the verifiability of its evidence. It determines how much weight citation carries.
- Secondary criticism
- Scholarly interpretation of a text by another reader. It is cited to be contested, extended or complicated, never merely summarised as if it settled the question.
- Reflexivity
- Acknowledging the assumptions and limits of one's own interpretive lens, presenting the reading as a defensible position among alternatives rather than as the text's single meaning.
- Independent inquiry
- A self-directed investigation in which the student selects texts, frames a question, gathers and evaluates sources, and defends an interpretation through sustained evidence-based argument.
- Interpretive community
- A group sharing reading conventions, values and assumptions that shape what counts as a plausible interpretation. It explains why readings of one text diverge historically.
- Textual intervention
- A creative or transformative response that reworks a source text's perspective, genre or ending, accompanied by a rationale explaining the interpretive choices made.
- Referencing convention
- A consistent author-date citation system with page numbers for direct quotation, paired with a reference list containing only sources actually cited in the response.