Ingarihi hei kaupapa

Every artist was first an amateur

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

te ao Māori principles

There are five key principals that we as an English Department consider important as part of a holistic study at school. Please read through these and know that we will come back to them as we begin looking at texts.

• Kaitiakitanga: Guardianship of natural resources and elements of sustainability
• Rangatiratanga: Leadership, authority, Mana, empowerment, Respect
• Manaakitanga: The process of showing respect, generosity and care for others.
• Whanaungatanga: A relationship through shared experiences and working together which provides people with a sense of belonging.
• Tikanga: The customary system of values and practices that have developed over time and are deeply embedded in the social context.

Exercises

English as a Subject

Ingarihi hei kaupapa

English looks at how to use the language of English in a really effective way, but also celebrates some of the great writers throughout history.

The aim of this course is to teach you the way in which the genre works (eg, how poetry works) and then introduce various techniques before finally studying a specific selection in preparation for an assessment.

 

Throughout the junior English programme we will look at several genre, analysing them, reading them widely, and assessing them based upon their merit.

 

There are two components to be aware of. The emphases is on reading and writing. Everything that we do in English is based around one of those two attributes. Sometimes the writing is creative, sometimes academic, sometimes persuasive and sometimes reflective. The outcome will be anything from a newspaper to a speech, an essay to a poem. Every time you write something, you are contributing to the English canon. The canon is the whole ‘body’ of work that has been written, published or printed.

Imagine you have to run a store which categorises films into different genre, such as science fiction, comedy etc. (like a video store used to do). Look at the list below and consider where you place them. Some you will have to research.

1. Star Wars
2. Jaws
3. Forrest Gump
4. E.T. The Extra Terrestrial
5. Spider Man
6. To Kill a Mockingbird
7. Avatar
8. King Kong
9. David Attenborough’s Life on Earth
10. Green Book
11. Ben Hur
12. The Great Gatsby
13. Taken
14. 2012
15. The Shining
16. Parasite
17. Psycho
18. Casablanca
19. Me Before You
20. March of the Penguins
21. Schindler’s List
22. The Wizard of Oz
23. Scream
24. Frozen
25. Cruella

Each major genre of literature (novel, short story, film, TV etc) have techniques that are specific to that genre. We will learn these over the course of the English curriculum.

 

So the order of things will be to learn the techniques associated with the genre, and then apply those ideas to specific texts.

 

In addition, you will also be reading together as a class. There will be four texts that your teacher will introduce over the course of the year. One each term. You should read this in your own time, as well as the time allocated in class. It is always helpful to stay ahead of the curve here, so make sure you are up to date!

 

Imagine the course as building your skill week by week. Then, by the time you are in year 11 and 12, you will have all you need to tackle those senior courses and have found a new love for reading, and understanding literature.

 

World Literature Periods

Later Periods of Literature

These periods are spans of time in which literature shared intellectual, linguistic, religious, and artistic influences. In the Western tradition, the later periods of literary history are roughly as follows below:

 

THE ENLIGHTENMENT (NEOCLASSICAL) PERIOD (C. 1660-­1790)

“Neoclassical” refers to the increased influence of Classical literature upon these centuries. The Neoclassical Period is also called the “Enlightenment” due to the increased reverence for logic and disdain for superstition. The period is marked by the rise of Deism, intellectual backlash against earlier Puritanism, and America’s revolution against England.

1. RESTORATION PERIOD (c. 1660-­‐1700): This period marks the British king’s restoration to the throne after a long period of Puritan domination in England. Its symptoms include the dominance of French and Classical influences on poetry and drama. Sample writers include John Dryden, John Lock, Sir William Temple, and Samuel Pepys, and Aphra Behn in England. Abroad, representative authors include Jean Racine and Molière.
2. THE AUGUSTAN AGE (c. 1700-­‐1750): This period is marked by the imitation of Virgil and Horace’s literature in English letters. The principal English writers include Addison, Steele, Swift, and Alexander Pope. Abroad, Voltaire is the dominant French writer.
3. THE AGE OF JOHNSON (c. 1750-­‐1790): This period marks the transition toward the upcoming Romanticism though the period is still largely Neoclassical. Major writers include Dr. Samuel Johnson, Boswell, and Edward Gibbon who represent the Neoclassical tendencies, while writers like Robert Burns, Thomas Gray, Cowper, and Crabbe show movement away from the Neoclassical ideal. In America, this period is called the Colonial Period. It includes colonial and revolutionary writers like Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Thomas Paine.

 

ROMANTIC PERIOD (c. 1790-­1830)

Romantic poets write about nature, imagination, and individuality in England. Some Romantics include Coleridge, Blake, Keats, and Shelley in Britain and Johann von Goethe in Germany. In America, this period is called the Transcendental Period. Transcendentalists include Emerson and Thoreau.  Gothic writings, (c. 1790-­‐1890) overlap with the Romantic and Victorian periods. Writers of Gothic novels (the precursor to horror novels) include Mary Shelley, Radcliffe, Monk Lewis, and Victorians like Bram Stoker in Britain. In America, Gothic writers include Poe and Hawthorne.

 

VICTORIAN PERIOD And The 19th Century (c. 1832-­1901)

Writing during the period of Queen Victoria’s reign includes sentimental novels. British writers include Elizabeth Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Matthew Arnold, Robert Browning, Charles Dickens, the Brontë sisters, and Jane Austen. Pre-­‐ Raphaelites, like the Rossettis and William Morris, idealize and long for the morality of the medieval world.

 

 

The end of the Victorian Period is marked by intellectual movements of Asceticism and “the Decadence” in the writings of Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde. In America, Naturalist writers like Stephen Crane flourish, as do early free verse poets like Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.

 

MODERN PERIOD (c. 1914-­1945)

In Britain, modernist writers include W. B. Yeats, Seamus Heaney, Dylan Thomas, W. H. Auden, Virginia Woolf, and Wilfred Owen. In America, the modernist period includes Robert Frost and Flannery O’Connor as well as the famous writers of The Lost Generation (also called the writers of The Jazz Age, 1914-­‐1929) such as Hemingway, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, and Faulkner. “The Harlem Renaissance” marks the rise of black writers such as Baldwin and Ellison. Realism is the dominant fashion, but the disillusionment with the World Wars lead to new experimentation.

 

POSTMODERN PERIOD (c. 1945 onward)

T. S. Eliot, Morrison, Shaw, Beckett, Stoppard, Fowles, Calvino, Ginsberg, Pynchon, and other modern writers, poets, and playwrights experiment with metafiction and fragmented poetry. Multiculturalism leads to increasing canonization of non-­‐Caucasian writers such as Langston Hughes, Sandra Cisneros, and Zora Neal Hurston. Magic Realists such as Gabriel García Márquez, Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier, Günter Grass, and Salman Rushdie flourish with surrealistic writings embroidered in the conventions of realism.

 

 

Ko te reo te tuakiri | Language is my identity.  
Ko te reo tōku ahurei | Language is my uniqueness.
Ko te reo te ora. | Language is life.