Immigrant Chronicle (1 Viewer)

[mike12345678]

hey guys,

two quick questions:

1) is the immigrant chronicle meant to be read as seperate sections and analyse them or is it meant to be read as a whole?


2) also can someone please tell me some related texts that can be used to support it? any advice would be greatly appreciated

thanx guys

 

[MetalTheory]

1) Immigrant Chronicle is meant to be read as a whole text not as a conglomerate of poems, though you will need to acknowledge that it is a suite of poems in an essay. This is what my teacher has told our class to do. Furthermore, in an essay you should be picking lines from all of the poems that fit to the provided question. Choosing certain poems to write about restricts discussion in the body and may be to your detriment if you the specific type of belonging found in a poem you studied varies from that which the question gives you, which will happen in the HSC since each year's paper varies the specificity of belonging; 2011 was belonging to places, 2010 was belonging to family/people, etc.

2) The main premise of Skrzynecki's poetry is that he's caught between the worlds of his Polish and European heritage by extension and the Australian culture that surrounds him. Caught between two worlds, that's the key phrase there. So choose a text that shows a protagonist who's caught between two worlds and look into how their own interaction between those worlds shape their experiences of belonging. Texts I chose for this topic were The Outsider by H.P. Lovecraft, a horror short story which is about an individual isolated from society whose loneliness drives him to encounter others but only to find disappointment, and an episode of Seinfeld The Pool Guy, where George's fiancée Suzan's newfound friendship with main character Elaine drives him to anxiety and paranoia with hilarious results.

Hope I can be of help.

 

[mike12345678]

thanx for the help

what else could they ask about in terms of belonging? place, people

 

[MetalTheory]

Other ways to find belonging include religion, race, nationality, social class, family, gender, culture, hobbies, etc. But all of those fall under belonging to people or places and those are the big ones you'll need to look out for.

The extended response question in the 2011 English paper regarded belonging to places and asked "Explore how perceptions of belonging and not belonging can be influenced by connections to places." That was a fairly broad question. The 2010 question asked about belonging to others and its relevance in an individual's overall feeling of belonging, while the 2009 question was a more general question about belonging and how understanding leads to the nourishment associated with belonging. But don't assume that this will be so in the 2012 paper. They might hit you with a specific question or throw you off-guard by asking about a specific poem. This is why you need to know all your poems when you walk into that exam room. A similar thing happened with Module B of the English Advanced Paper 2 in the 2011 paper and this is why you need to have a firm grasp on everything, in case the Board of Studies decide to end the Belonging topic in the harshest way possible.