Text Analysis Guides

VCE English texts analysed by our top tutors and published authors. We highlight all important information about each teach to help you tackle Text Response with ease.

Lindsey Dang

An Ultimate Guide to Wordsworth’s Poetry

Romantic works are often centred around the life experience of individuals within both the spiritual and physical realms; they attempt to capture individual variations in perception, multiplying and co-existing truths, and the capacity the receptive consciousness has to filter and re-create reality.

Dang Tung (“Ringo”) Bach

An Ultimate Guide to Sunset Boulevard by Billy Wilder

Sunset Boulevard is a 1950 film noir written and directed by Billy Wilder. It follows Joe Gillis, a struggling screenwriter, as he stumbles upon former movie star Norma Desmond.

Giorgia Benini

An Ultimate Guide to Rainbow's End by Jane Harrison

Jane Harrison’s 2007 play ‘Rainbow’s End’ invites its audience into the household of three Indigenous women as they struggle to realise their dreams in an era of racial segregation and dispossession.

Lindsey Dang

An Ultimate Guide to We Have Always Lived in the Castle

Instead of focusing on paranormality, Jackson conveys a “vast intimacy with everyday evil, with the pathological undertones of prosaic human configurations: a village, a family, a self”.

Livia Tropea

An Ultimate Guide to My Brilliant Career

Characterised by its frank portrayal of hardship and oppression, Franklin’s writing reflects the social and political movements of federalism and female suffrage, emphasising the disempowerment of women in Australia while celebrating the Australian working class and natural environment with a strong sense of patriotism.

Giorgia Benini

An Ultimate Guide to Flames

Robbie Arnott’s magical realism novel Flames embarks on a journey through Tasmania to meditate on the complexity of human emotion and our relationship with nature. Centred in the natural world, Flames asks us to reject anthropocentrism and to consider the ways in which we are a reflection of, and a part of, the natural world.

Ethan Sporton

An Ultimate Guide to The Memory Police

The Memory Police poses numerous questions about the nature of memory and loss—if someone loses a part of themselves, are they still the same person? Is forgetting inherently bad, and are we ought to resist it? Is anything ever truly forgotten? Acclaimed Japanese author Yōko Ogawa’s 1994 dystopian novel explores these questions through the story of an island where various objects ‘disappear’ frequently and inexplicably, both from the island and from people’s memories.

Giorgia Benini

An Ultimate Guide to Chronicle of a Death Foretold

Centred around the honour killing of a man named Santiago Nasar, the novella unfolds in reverse, with the motive and perpetrators identified almost immediately.

Livia Tropea

An Ultimate Guide to Oedipus The King

Sophocles’ tragic play, Oedipus the King, depicts a spectacular deterioration of its titular protagonist as he realises the truth of his own past: that he has killed his own father, and committed incest with his mother. Resisting reality at every point, Oedipus tirelessly drives an investigation into who killed the previous king, Laius, undoing himself and his family in the process.

Shakhram Rakhmatullaev

An Ultimate Guide to False Claims of Colonial Thieves

False Claims of Colonial Thieves is a poetry collection that weaves together two unlikely, and some may even think oppositional, Australian voices. First Nations poet Charmaine Papertalk Green is a member of the Yamaji Peoples of Western Australia; John Kinsella is of anglo-celtic heritage, descended from settler-invaders who made their wealth through farming and mining, practices that alienated Indigenous people from their land.

Ella Waldman

An Ultimate Guide to Much Ado About Nothing

Set in Messina, it focuses on two intertwined stories of love and deception: the gulling of Benedick and Beatrice that results in them declaring their love for one another and the trickery that led Claudio into believing his wife-to-be Hero was unchaste.

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