Research Essay

Research Essay
Essays should be precise and well-planned, drawing on research comprising of the primary text(s) plus a minimum of six (6) quality secondary/critical sources. You may use any (or none) of the AustLit Scholar Profile articles.

An essay writing Style Guide is available through the ENGL200 iLearn site. The marking rubric for this assessment is separately available on iLearn under ‘Assessments’. In research essays there is a greater assessment focus on your choice and use of research to add depth, rigour and clarity to your argument.

All essays must be submitted electronically through the Turnitin link which will be opened (with instructions) under ‘Assessments’ on the ENGL200 iLearn site. There are no hard copy submissions. Ensure you specify the question attempted at the start of your essay.

Penalties Thus the maximum word count without penalty is 2,199; the minimum is 1801. Word count does not include title page or works cited.
Choose ONE of the following topics:

1. How do Voss and Laura communicate differently from the public sphere, to the private, to the epistolary (ie. in their letters)? Which of these three modes does White present as ultimately more fulfilling and how might this prove instructive for his version of 1950s Australia?

2. Compare and contrast representations of Sydney in The First Australians film with ONE Francis Webb poem from this list: ‘The Song of a New Australian’, ‘End of the Picnic’, ‘Ward Two: Harry’, ‘For My Grandfather’, ‘Clouds’. How can colonial and modern Sydneys be seen to co-exist in light of these texts?

3. ‘We cannot afford to believe colonial history, or the reconfigurations we make of it … History is a legitimizing device and revising it or rewriting it is simply contributing to the process of legitimizing the social and temporal worlds that harness our culture.” (Greg Lehman, “A Desire for Uncertainty” 14)
Outline instances in Death of a River Guide where historical fiction both conforms to and resists this legitimizing role.

4. Henry Reynolds declares that ‘the tension between history, culture and identity on the one hand, and geography on the other, was always most apparent in North Australia. It was there that geography threatened to engulf history’. (North of Capricorn, viii).
For Reynolds, how is history challenged by realities of ‘place’? Discuss the relationship between place and history in Australia, with explicit reference to Reynolds’ excerpt from North of Capricorn and one other unit text (if you like, this can be an excerpt from the Unit Reader, or any poem in Webb or CAAP).

5. How do the Queensland and Sydney portions of William Yang’s Sadness frame and critique one another in terms of place, nation and Yang’s identity?

6. Concentrating on two poems from Contemporary Asian Australian Poetry, how is the North constructed imaginatively and symbolically as stretching beyond Northern Australia into the Asia-Pacific region? Consider technical (structure, tone, language devices) as well as thematic aspects of the poems in your answer.
40 Suggestions for AustLit Scholar Profile
(Investigate potential choices / available articles via AustLit, APA-FT databases; you can also find your own, provided the scholar/article can be retrieved this way)

Ackland, Michael
Alizadeh, Ali
Ashcroft, William

Balaa, Luma
Birns, Nicholas
Bird, Deborah Rose
Brennan, Bernadette
Bradford, Clare

Cahill, Michelle

Dalziell, Tanya
Dixon, Robert

Farrell, Michael

Gelder, Ken
Genoni, Paul

Haag, Oliver
Heiss, Anita
Henderson, Ian

Jensen, Lars
Jose, Nicholas
Kampmark, Natasa
Kelen, Kit (Chirstopher)
Kirkpatrick, Peter

Lever, Susan

McCooey, David
McCredden, Lyn
McMahon, Elizabeth
Mead, Philip
Meyer, Therese-Marie
Minter, Peter
Moore, Nicole

O’Reilly, Nathaniel
Olubas, Brigid
Ommunden, Wenche

Ravenscroft, Alison
Rooney, Brigid

Shoemaker, Adam

Watt, George
Webb, Jen
Webby, Elizabeth

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