Close Study of Literature

Paper 2 Section II is one extended response worth 20 marks on the prescribed text you studied for Close study of literature (called "Module B" in the previous syllabus). The question may include a stimulus, and it may name your text ("How does Shakespeare...") or work for every text ("How does your prescribed text...").

• The paper: Paper 2 has 5 minutes reading time and 2 hours working time for three 20-mark sections. Give this essay about 40 minutes.
• What is marked: how well you explain your text's ideas and its distinctive qualities in answer to the question, your analysis of evidence across the whole text, and the organisation and expression of your argument.

What the focus area is about

Close study means you know one literary text in depth. The syllabus asks you to study:

• how the text's form, language and stylistic choices shape meaning (its distinctive qualities);
• how mode and medium (print, stage, screen) shape meaning and your response;
• how the text influences and positions readers;
• the relationship between the text and its context;
• how the text conforms to, or challenges, the conventions of its form or genre;
• different interpretations of the text from a range of perspectives, and your own informed interpretation;
• how to build a logical, sustained argument about the text's ideas.

Context, conventions and different interpretations are named in the 2024 syllabus, so expect questions on them. From 2027 this focus area is analytical only: no creative response.

The prescribed texts (2027–2030)

• Prose fiction: M. T. Anderson, Feed; Robbie Arnott, Limberlost.
• Poetry: Carol Ann Duffy, Collected Poems (set poems); Oodgeroo Noonuccal, My People (set poems).
• Drama: William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing.
• Film: Denis Villeneuve, Arrival.

Much Ado About Nothing is out of copyright, so you can read the whole play on this site. For the other texts, use your school's copy. For poetry, be ready to discuss at least two set poems in depth.

"Distinctive qualities" are what make your text recognisably itself. They usually fall into four groups:

• Form and genre: comedy, satire, speculative fiction, dramatic monologue, protest poetry, science fiction film. What are the conventions, and does your text follow or bend them?
• Language and style: the texture of the writing: wit and wordplay, slang, lyrical description, spare diction, repetition, imagery.
• Structure: linear or non-linear, plot and sub-plot, framing, how the text opens and ends.
• Voice and perspective: who tells the story or speaks the poem, and how reliable or limited they are.

For each group, prepare two or three examples from your text and be able to say what each one contributes to the text's ideas.

Context is the world in which a text was made and the world it depicts, and also the world in which you read it. Use context to explain choices, not to fill space. For example:

• Much Ado About Nothing (around 1598–99) reflects Elizabethan ideas about honour, reputation and women's chastity. Hero's public shaming at her wedding shows how much a woman's honour depended on others' words.
• Feed (2002) satirises a consumer society shaped by advertising and the early commercial internet, and imagines that the internet is wired directly into people's brains.
• My People draws on Oodgeroo Noonuccal's poetry written during the Aboriginal civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s; her collection We Are Going (1964) was the first book of poetry published by an Aboriginal Australian author.
• Arrival (2016) is adapted from Ted Chiang's short story "Story of Your Life" (1998) and was released at a time of global political division.

One or two precise sentences of context in a paragraph, linked to a technique, is the right amount.

Every form has conventions, which audiences expect. Writers can follow them, play with them, or break them, and each choice shapes meaning.

• Shakespearean comedy usually moves from confusion to resolution, ends in marriage, and mixes high-status lovers with low-status comic characters.
• Dystopian fiction imagines a future society to warn about the present.
• Science fiction film often uses first contact with aliens as a story of conflict; a text can use the convention to tell a different kind of story.
• Protest poetry often uses direct address, a collective "we" and plain, memorable language.

A strong essay notices where the text surprises us by bending a convention, and explains why.

You need an informed personal interpretation, and awareness that others read the text differently. Readings may come from:

• different perspectives (for example a feminist reading of Much Ado's treatment of Hero);
• different contexts (an Elizabethan audience compared with a twenty-first-century audience);
• different productions or adaptations of a play;
• critics, or your classmates.

Present another reading fairly, weigh it against evidence, and say what you think. Phrases such as "Some readers see..., but the ending suggests..." work well.

Thesis

Your thesis answers the question and names a distinctive quality. For example (for a question not in our practice bank, "How does your prescribed text use humour to explore serious ideas?"):

"In Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare uses the sharp, competitive wit of Beatrice and Benedick and the confused speech of Dogberry to show that language can protect people, wound them and, finally, reveal the truth."

Paragraphs

1. A topic sentence that answers the question.
2. Three or four pieces of evidence from across the text (the opening, the middle, the ending), each with technique and effect.
3. Where useful, a sentence on context, convention or another interpretation.
4. A link back to the question.

This paragraph answers the thesis above. The quotations are from the play's text on this site.

Topic sentence: Shakespeare establishes Beatrice and Benedick's wit as a defence that keeps others, and their own feelings, at a distance.

Analysis: Leonato explains at once that "There is a kind of merry war" between them, a paradox that presents their arguments as both play and combat. Beatrice's hyperbole, "I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow than a man swear he loves me," turns romance into noise, mocking the conventions of courtship before she can be hurt by them. Both speak mostly in quick prose rather than verse, which marks their wit as everyday and combative rather than lyrical. Yet once Benedick is tricked into believing Beatrice loves him, he expects to be mocked for changing his mind, but dismisses the jokes as "paper bullets of the brain" — a metaphor that admits a war of words was never truly dangerous — and concludes, comically, that "the world must be peopled." The contrast between the defensive wit of the opening and this self-mocking surrender shows that their humour hid real feeling all along.

Link: Shakespeare's comic wordplay therefore entertains the audience while revealing a serious idea: language can be a shield that people must learn to lower.

• Plot summary: close study does not mean retelling closely. Every sentence should argue.
• Ignoring distinctive qualities: writing only about ideas and not about form, language, structure and style.
• Evidence from one part of the text: move across the whole text; markers reward a sense of the work as a whole.
• Context dumps: paragraphs of history with no link to a technique.
• Film and drama treated as novels: use stage and screen terms: staging, dramatic irony, soliloquy, mise-en-scène, editing, sound.
• One poem only: for Duffy and Oodgeroo, discuss at least two set poems.
• Forgetting your view: questions about interpretations still need your informed judgement.

• Learn short quotations or moments for each distinctive quality and each major idea.
• For Much Ado, know the structure of the two love plots and how the comic sub-plot of the Watch resolves the serious one.
• For Arrival, know how the editing shapes the audience's understanding and be able to discuss specific scenes precisely.
• For Feed, quote the narrative voice and the feed's advertising language, and show what they reveal.
• For Limberlost, be ready to discuss place: questions about setting, nature and belonging suit this text.
• Practise with a mix of general questions and questions that name your text and author.

• Language, identity and culture: both are 40-minute analytical essays; the same structure and paragraph method apply.
• Texts and human experiences: many Close study questions turn on human experience (love, conflict, grief, change), so ideas from Paper 1 often transfer.
• The craft of writing: studying a literary text closely gives you models of style and structure for your own writing.