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Textual comprehension: While conceptual discussion is paramount, you must anchor it to the text. Sophisticated arguments consider the text as a whole, rather than isolated moments, so a comprehensive understanding of the text — and therefore diligence in class — is important. If you feel lost or lack time, Google '['text title'] study guide PDF', download a few safe links, curating your own study document with evidence.
- Characterisation
- Relationships
- Setting
- Plot
- Concepts
- Evidence
- Micro and macro devices
- Genre and form conventions
- Quote fragments
- Conceptual webs: You must be able to answer the question "What is my text really about?" rather than summarising the text. Articulate the causal relationships between each key concept so you can adapt your evidence to unseen questions. Building a word bank using rubric terms would be useful.
- Contextual knowledge: Authors generally do not awaken with the desire to use a metaphor. They respond to events or experiences the way you do, and try to represent (or critique, teach, inspire, etc.) audiences something about human nature and the world we live in. This leads to arguments about authorial intent.
- Biographical or personal
- Historical
- Sociocultural
- Literary criticism
- Practice questions
- Vocabulary bank
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In a stable lying almost in the shadow of the new stone church, a man with gray eyes and a gray beard, stretched on the ground amidst the animal odors, meekly seeks death like someone seeking sleep. The day, faithful to vast secret laws, continuously displaces and confounds the shadows in the wretched stable. Outside stretch the tilled fields, a deep ditch filled up with dead leaves, and the tracks of a wolf in the black mud where the woods begin. The man sleeps and dreams, forgotten. The bells calling to prayer awake him. In the kingdoms of England, the sound of the bells is already one of the customs of the afternoon, but the man, while still a boy, had seen the face of Woden, had seen holy dread and exultation, had seen the rude wooden idol weighed down with Roman coins and heavy vestments, seen the sacrifice of horses, dogs, and prisoners. Before dawn he would be dead and with him would die, never to return, the last firsthand images of the pagan rites. The world would be poorer when this Saxon was no more.
We may well be astonished by space-filling acts which come to an end when someone dies, and yet something, or an infinite number of things, die in each death—unless there is a universal memory, as the theosophists have conjectured. There was a day in time when the last eyes to see Christ were closed forever. The battle of Junín and the love of Helen died with the death of some one man. What will die with me when I die? What pathetic or frail form will the world lose? Perhaps the voice of Macedonio Fernandez, the image of a horse in the vacant space at Serrano and Charcas, a bar of sulfur in the drawer of a mahogany desk?
(Translated by ANTHONY KERRIGAN)
- Read, isolate, and underline the key terms of the question. You may wish to cross them off at the end of your essay to verify your engagement with each part.
"To what extent" can be answered with absolute confirmation or rejection, but a more creative or original argument would likely bend other parts of the question for a nuanced interpretation:
Perhaps [x] occurs because of [z], rather than [y]
Perhaps [z], rather than [x], occurs because of [y]
Perhaps the author doesn't suggest but demonstrates…
Have you engaged with 1. the extent, 2. the author's suggestion, 3. [x] occuring in the text, 4. as a result of 5. [y] in the text? - "Engage with the question" by:
- Explicitly use the terms of the question.
- Use close synonyms or derivations of the key terms of the question. Synonyms have similar connotations. You may also find a more specific synonym (e.g. if the question is about 'change', you could specify 'expansion' or 'reduction').
- Nominalisation (converting verbs or adjectives into nouns) e.g. destroy > destruction.
- Adjectivisation (converting verbs or nouns into adjectives) e.g. destruction > destructive.
- Verbalisation (converting nouns or adjectives into verbs) e.g. destructive > destroy.
- Unpack the key terms and apply concrete textual examples of the key terms in your argument, drawing from characters, events, etc.
- Extend and broaden your argument by conceptually linking your concept to another one.
- Identify the antonym for each term. You could support the claim of the question or resist the proposition or assumptions embedded in the question (within reason and relevance). The latter is typical of a stronger response. A question about hope could address despair.
- Interpret the key terms metaphorically: if the question is about love, think beyond the obvious and concrete examples of romantic or familial relationships but a love of self or love for the idea of love. If a question asks about entrapment, consider the metaphorical entrapment by status or societal expectations, rather than the more detectable entrapment in a relationship.
- Engage with the question throughout the entire essay.
- How does Borges represent the paradox of preservation and loss?
- Discuss how the “face of Woden” is used to explore the relationship between individual memory and cultural extinction.
- Explain the significance of religious motifs, language, and images.
- Analyse the structure of the text.
- Evaluate Borges' concluding rhetorical questions, and consider how they complicate our understanding of historically significant memory.
- To make your work more conceptual, remember that:
- Your task is to analyse how language choices represent ideas, not psychoanalyse the characters or describe the setting. Don't write “within the text” but consider how language choice and context define the representation of ideas.
- You must be able to answer the question "What is my text really about?" rather than summarising the text. Articulate the causal relationships between each key concept so you can adapt your evidence to unseen questions. Building a word bank using rubric terms would be useful. Too often, students only focus on how language represents the narrative elements and fail to articulate how the narrative elements are instrumentalised to represent ideas. Texts are really about ideas. Concepts (or ideas) are abstract. Do not summarise the text (use evidence to tell us what happens): Borges represents the old man lying on the floor.
Do not describe the evidence by
simply identifying how it is shown: Borges uses the simile of a man “[seeking] death like someone seeking sleep” to represent the man lying on the floor seeking death.
or restating the quote or “taking the quote nowhere”: Borges uses the simile of a man “[seeking] death like someone seeking sleep” to represent the search for death.