HSC English Advanced Tutoring

An overview of the Texts and Human Experiences module, the syllabus language you will need, and why Harwood's poetry suits the course.

Topics Covered

- Welcome

- Outline: What the Module Asks

- Syllabus: Outcomes and Content

- Word Bank: Key Terminology

- Harwood's Personal Context

- Gender and Literary Culture

- Intellectual and Cultural Influences

- Memory and Retrospection

- Innocence and Loss

- Mortality

The world Harwood wrote in: post-war Australia, a literary scene run by men, and the music and philosophy behind her work. Closes with the themes that recur across the collection.

Topics Covered

- Aim and Outline

- Post-War Australia: Conformity and Order

- Gender and Literary Authority

- Intellectual and Philosophical Influences

- Place and Dislocation

- Memory and Retrospection

- Innocence and Knowledge

- Gendered Silencing

- The Limits of Language

A line-by-line reading of Harwood's domestic gothic. A child tries to trap daylight in a jar to protect himself through the night, and learns what happens when the trick fails.

Topics Covered

- Introduction: The Domestic Gothic

- Structural Overview

- Full Poem

- The Ritual of Light

- The Monstrance and the Woods

- The Invasion of the Dream

- The Fall of Hope

- The Trauma of Discovery

- The Malignant Ballet

- The Indifferent Morning

- Coda: Universal Resolution

The poem takes the same materials as "The Glass Jar", a frightened child and a parent who cannot fix things, and arrives at peace instead of terror.

Topics Covered

- Introduction: A Comparison with "The Glass Jar"

- Structural Overview: The Three Movements

- Full Poem

- The Present: Dusk

- Transition: Mitchelton

- The Childhood Crisis

- Reconciliation: The Lighting

- Resolution: The Scent Returns

- Comparative Notes

Harwood's most settled poem about dying, read stanza by stanza. A friendship, a grave, and three time frames that fold into one another.

Topics Covered

- Introduction and Thoughts

- Structural Overview: Three Time Frames

- Full Poem

- Stanza 1: The Genesis

- Stanza 2: The Weight of the Present

- Stanza 3: The Parable of the Pumpkins

- Stanza 4: The Shared Pitcher

- Stanza 5: The Final Return

- Comparative Notes

Two poems, forty years apart. "Barn Owl" follows a child who shoots an owl at dawn. "Nightfall" follows the same speaker walking with her dying father at dusk.

Topics Covered

- Overview

- The Diptych Form

- Thematic Overview

- Full Poem

- Structural Overview: Form, Metre, Rhyme, and the Forty-Year Gap

- Analysis: "Barn Owl", Stanzas 1 to 7

- Analysis: "Nightfall", Stanzas 1 to 7

- Key Techniques: Irony, the King Lear Allusion, Naming, Cyclical Structure

- Comparative Notes: The Father Figure, Memory, Mortality

- Module Connections

Donne tells his wife not to grieve his leaving, then spends nine stanzas proving why she should not have to. Covers the metaphysical conceit and how the argument is built.

Topics Covered

- Overview

- Context and Occasion

- Metaphysical Poetry

- The Argument in Brief

- Full Poem

- Structural Overview: Form, the Three-Part Argument, Metre and Tone

- Stanza-by-Stanza Analysis, Stanzas 1 to 9

- Key Techniques: The Conceit, Religious Register, the Hierarchy of Love, the Dying Virtuous Man

- Thematic Concerns: Love and the Mind, Absence and Continuity, Constancy

- Comparative Notes and Module Connections

Harwood writes superb images and does not quite trust them. This lesson covers what she thinks language cannot hold, and sets her doubt against Donne's confidence that the right analogy proves anything.

Topics Covered

- Overview: Language as Harwood's Subject

- Wittgenstein and the Boundaries of Thought

- Metaphor as Method: How Harwood Builds Meaning

- Metaphor as Failure: Where the Image Breaks Down

- Naming and Its Power in "Father and Child"

- Silence, Ellipsis, and What Goes Unsaid

- Music as the Language Beyond Language

- Donne's Conceit Against Harwood's Doubt

- Module Connections: Aesthetic Qualities and the Power of Language

- Pulling It All Together

Mortality across the whole collection, from the child who learns what death is to the adult who can finally stand beside a grave and keep looking.

Topics Covered

- Overview: Mortality as Harwood's Constant

- First Knowledge: The Owl and the Child

- The Indifference of Nature in "The Glass Jar"

- Loss Held in Memory in "The Violets"

- Standing at the Grave in "At Mornington"

- The Father's Acceptance in "Nightfall"

- Donne's Dying Virtuous Men

- What Holds Against Ending: Music, Memory, Shared Days

- Module Connections: Emotional and Intellectual Experience

- Pulling It All Together

How to write a Common Module response on Harwood. Reading the question, building a thesis that argues rather than lists, and choosing which poems can carry a single line of thinking across a whole essay.

Topics Covered

- Overview: What Texts and Human Experiences Questions Ask

- Unpacking the Question

- Writing About Experience, Not Themes

- Building a Thesis That Argues Something

- Choosing Your Poems: Which Ones Work Together

- The Paragraph Model

- Evidence: Quotation, Technique, and Effect

- Writing About Form and Structure in Poetry

- Using Context Without Padding

- Handling the Related Text

- Common Mistakes in Common Module Responses

- Sample Question and Model Paragraph