ENGL10002: Literature and Performance

A text-based exercise of 800 words worth 20% (due early in semester), an essay of 1200 words worth 30% (due mid-semester) and an essay of 2000 words worth 50% (due in the examination period).

What they don’t tell you is that VCE Literature is assumed knowledge, which made it much more difficult for me.

Every student in the subject I had encountered had done Literature in VCE, which made the first essay very easy for them, and the poetry part of the course much more manageable, as it was no different to what they had encountered in VCE Literature.
I was very lazy. I don’t believe I read a single novel or play that semester, and for the last essay (a research essay on your choice of two novels) I only used summaries from the internet and some expert essays, so this subject is quite manageable, especially if you are willing to put in the work and have done VCE literature.

I found the lectures quite interesting and they went into far more detail than you ever would have experienced in VCE, so if you enjoy language analysis this subject is probably going to interest you a lot. That being said, more often than not the content in the lectures did not relate to what we did in the tutorials and what the essay prompts were asking for.

If you haven’t done VCE Literature but were quite good with the Language Analysis section of VCE English, then you won’t have much to worry about. Most people I knew had gotten similar or lower scores in this subject than I did anyway, so if it interests you and you are willing to do a lot of reading (which I wasn’t) then you will definitely do well.

No

There are not any exams for this subject.

3 Out of 5

W Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, Oxford Worlds Classics
W Shakespeare, Othello, Oxford Worlds Classics
D Lynch and J Stillinger, eds. The Norton Anthology of English Literature Volume D: The Romantic Period, Norton
J Austen, Pride and Prejudice, Oxford Worlds Classics
C Dickens, Great Expectations, Oxford Worlds Classics
C Bronte, Jane Eyre, Oxford Worlds Classics
H Ibsen, A Doll's House (Four Major Plays), Oxford Worlds Classics
A Chekhov, The Cherry Orchard (Five Plays), Oxford Worlds Classics
And a subject reader

Two 1-hour lectures and a 1-hour tutorial per week.

Semester 1, 2012

74 (H2B)