Module B State Ranker Exemplar Essay - An Artist of the Floating World

Writing essays for Module B: Critical Study of Literature isn’t a piece of cake, but we’re here to break it down for you. Understanding Module B means to engage deeply and analyse one prescribed text by expressing complex ideas precisely and showing critical knowledge of the text’s specific language features using an informed personal perspective. Given this, what exactly should students be doing?

NESA’s Module B Rubric: English Advanced requires the following points to be met by students:

• Detailed Analysis: examine the text’s form, content and language. This means understanding how and why the composer used specific techniques to achieve their purpose and convey ideas. By doing so, students develop detailed analytical thinking skills.
• Textual Integrity: how do themes, form and language work together to create a cohesive and substantial literary text? Students need to engage deeply and conduct a close analysis of their text in order to justify why the text has value based on the detailed evidence drawn earlier.
  • Read Project Academy’s Guide to Textual Integrity for a more detailed breakdown of this rubric note.
  • The process of writing creative and critical texts overlap here!
• Contextual Evaluation: consider the context of the text and evaluate how this shaped the text’s composition and reception (personal and intellectual connections to the audience) over time. Are you writing with considered perspective of the historical, social or cultural context from the composer? The context shapes everything!

Now taking this all into consideration and without further ado, the following HSC English Advanced Module B essay was written by Rachel Quah.

Rachel’s Notable Achievements:

• 18th in NSW for English Advanced
• 14th in NSW for Biology
• 99.85 ATAR

A State Ranker’s Module B English Advanced Response

Question: How has your study of An Artist of the Floating World altered and expanded your understanding of art and tradition?

Representing diverse perspectives, Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World (AFW, 1986) confronts the complexities of identity and truth to transform understandings of art and tradition, investigating humanity’s tensions during times of transition. In a narrative self-portrait of Masuji Ono, an aging artist, Ishiguro questions an individual’s ability to accurately perceive the past, embracing the postmodern multiplicity of truth. Similarly, these memories are responsible for moulding the present – a world of shifting traditions and intergenerational tensions, mirroring Britain’s fractious Thatcherism within post-war Japan. Ishiguro thus interrogates the artist’s role in transitory landscapes, suggesting how art can guide individuals to truth amidst humanity’s grand narratives.

Illuminating the unreliability of grand narratives, Ishiguro’s AotFW confronts how humanity’s truths are informed by distorted self-perception, masking potential judgement. Ishiguro employs this postmodern ambiguity to accentuate postcolonial power structures, reflecting how reforms of Thatcherism and postwar Japan pressured individuals to recognise their own participation towards past harm. Uncertain of their position within polarising society, individuals thus defend themselves through distorted self-perception – a tragic ‘blindness’ epitomised in Ono’s deliberate metanarrative. Opening with the anecdotal “auction of prestige,” Ono characterises himself by hierarchical status of “moral conduct and achievement,” embodying tatamae (façade) culture by omitting his role in producing imperialist propaganda. Through these narrative ‘negative spaces’, Ono conceals his shame and uncertainty towards the past, symbolically unable to “recall any colleague who could paint a self-portrait with complete honesty” – as realised by readers, a parallel to Ono’s own omissions as an unreliable narrator. Under polarising Japanese shame culture, Ono’s curation of truth thus distances his uncertainties from artistic and traditional criticism, exemplifying psychoanalytic theory – Ishiguro suggests that the individual “cog in the gigantic machine of war – feels bewildered in his orientation… [and] welcomes any indication…to find his bearings within himself,” (S. Freud, 1915). Despite later acknowledging his mistakes, Ono defends his motive through others’ actions, characterising himself through Sugimura - “a man who aspires to rise above the mediocre… even if in the end he fails.” Contrastingly, he denounces the “Tortoise” who lacks ambition to “produce paintings of genuine importance,” rationalising his pre-war behaviour in a complex self-portrait of narrative illusion, rather than truth. Through AFW, Ishiguro ultimately confronts how truth is informed by individuals’ intentionally distorted perceptions, with one’s self-narrative masking potential judgement from critical society. 

Subject to a transitory world, Ishiguro’s AFW navigates the intergenerational tensions that arise when past informs the present, confronting the uncomfortable truths of conflicting traditions.  Reflecting the reforms of Thatcherism, Ishiguro comprehends how changes to prevalent ideologies expose past mistakes, triggering youth’s criticism of older generations – in metaphoric Japan, a question of postwar responsibility that overtly condemns elders, disrespecting their established culture of mediation. Questioning both generations’ rigid values, AFW constructs a retrospective narration, positioning readers to aggregate meaning from both past and present. Ono’s storytelling thus mimics nonlinear memory, with the Migi-Hidari a symbolic palimpsest of the past that “remains as pleasing as ever” “for all the changes which have transformed the world around it.” However, like the Hirayama boy who was beaten by “the same people who once patted his head,” Ono’s nostalgia for bygone traditions conflicts with modern characters in an intergenerational ‘war’ of denial and responsibility, with Miyake ironically confronting nationalists as “the men who led the country astray”. Ono’s daughters, Setsuko and Noriko, further embody these intergenerational tensions as character foils, with Noriko asserting “it’s all a matter of opinion,” whilst Setsuko subtly suggests to “take certain precautionary steps”, yet both are indirectly accusatory in their dialogue. Burdened by this judgement, Ono contemplates the “Bridge of Hesitation” – a central motif of his nostalgia for the past and hesitancy to reconcile with modern traditions, and thus acquiescently exiles himself to a liminal, ‘floating’ world, in line with traditional conflict-avoidance culture. Through Ono’s characterisation, Ishiguro thus confronts universal fears towards transition – that “for all one’s good intentions, one had backed a wrong…cause, and wasted one’s best years… to it” (Ishiguro, 2016). Ultimately, Ishiguro’s AotFW constructs a microcosm of intergenerational tensions, with past ‘memories’ prompting readers to realise the consequences of conflicting traditions. 

Revealing art’s ability to guide humanity during conflict, Ishiguro urges readers to realise the artist’s transcendental role through AFW, confronting the tragedy of individuals lost in societal transition. In Ono’s quest for certainty, Ishiguro explores how artists are subject to polarising, yet subjective pressures amidst volatile society. Embodying 1980s British multiculturalism, Ishiguro thus fuses Western and Eastern aesthetics to mediate these pressures, uniting art’s interpretive value to its holistic significance. Ishiguro voices this poststructuralist insight by constructing a Künstlerroman, comprehending Ono’s exploration of art’s purposes.  In becoming “an artist of the floating world,” Ono pursues wider ephemerality, yet eventually rejects this indefinite Eastern aesthetic, seeking “something more tangible than those pleasurable things that disappear with the morning light,” and instead valuing the pointed Western aesthetic in “work of genuine value for these difficult times”. Ironically, Ono’s tragedy arises from his hypocritical difficulty “to rise above the sway of things”, obstinately mourning his bygone nationalist purpose of art. With his past another escapist ‘floating’ world , Ono’s hamartia is his self-exile to a liminal space between past and present, criticised by Ishiguro for his acquiescent refusal to guide new generations – an artistic obligation previously encouraged by Ono himself in his symbolic suggestions to Ichiro, his grandson, to “[draw] something first… [and] see if he can help make it better.” Unable to immortalise his artistic legacy, Ono’s tragic characterisation parallels the detached protagonists of Ishiguro’s revisionist oeuvre, including the subdued desperation of The Remains of the Day (1989). Unlike Ono, Ishiguro thus challenges his English audience to see beyond the façade of his metaphoric Japan and recognise the shared complexities of transition, with artists able to guide not only post-war Japan, but also Thatcher’s Britain and the postcolonial world. Ultimately, AFW advocates art’s ability to convey universal truth amidst times of tension, confronting how an artist’s responsibility is to “see clearly above the dogmatic fervours of one’s day,” (Ishiguro, 2016).

Overall, Ishiguro’s AFW critiques tendencies towards absolutism in transient society, transforming readers’ understandings of shifting intergenerational traditions and art’s guiding role amidst liminal truth.

Tips for English Essay Writing

After reading this essay, you would have found a rich interpretation of the text’s construction, appropriate use of language techniques, and judgements on detailed evidence. But how exactly did this come to be?

Below, we’ve written a checklist based on the English Advanced rubric that you can review before writing an essay, during, or after to check if you’ve met the requirements.

Checklist for HSC English Advanced Module B

• Have I performed a critical analysis of my prescribed text?
  • Do I have a sophisticated understanding of what the composer has written?

• What are the detailed analytical and critical qualities drawn from the text?
  • Were there any distinctive qualities about the text that I could analyse in my writing?
• Have I sufficiently evaluated notions provided by the composer and used my own context to enrich my writing?
  • How will you use your writing to express views provided by the composer?
  • Have I thought about different contexts that hadn’t stood out initially?
  • What is my personal interpretation of the text?
• Did I correctly register the structure and modality of the text? Why did the composer write in this way?
  • Are there any aesthetic and imaginative aspects from the text that I want to write about?

Checklist across all HSC English Advanced Modules

• Have I applied my own analytical and critical knowledge of text interpretation?
• Do I have a deep understanding of what the essay question is asking me to do?
  • Was there a particular point from the text that stood out to answer the question at hand?
• Am I using grammar appropriately?
• Am I composing creative and critical essays? Not just in this essay but across the HSC English Modules
  • Am I being increasingly informed of how English essays should be written?
  • Does my essay feel like a unified whole? Do the themes and techniques feel cohesive?
• Am I using appropriate register structure in my writing by selecting a level of formality, tone and vocabulary to match the audience, topic and context.

Conclusion

I hope this article provided a nice breakdown and exemplar of what English Advanced Module B requires of you to perform well. Even if you don’t study An Artist of the Floating World, I highly recommend giving the essay a read.

All the best for your essay writing :)