Burial Rites Essays

[SammyP]

Hey people.
Does anybody know some good essay prompts for 'Burial Rites'... or even better, some example essays?
I've having trouble finding stuff about it as it is a relatively new book and we are the first year studying it :/

[meganrobyn]

The Insight text guide has a few good ones - but, yeah, it's thin on the ground because I'm not aware of anyone having studied the text before, ever, in the history of the universe (understandable, though). So teachers are pretty much flying blind.

[stonefall]

I'm not sure about teachers flying blind. I'd say they know how to analyse and teach a text, and you just have to listen to what they tell you and use the essay writing skills you've been taught to come up with your own response to the text. surely if everyone just reads sample essays they end up writing all the same stuff. i know for a fact there are essays out there - i've come up with about twenty - i would say your teacher wants you to figure it out for yourself because that's where the better answers come from - students who can think for themselves and are willing to give it a crack.

[meganrobyn]

Well, they are, and I am, because everyone interprets a text differently - they see different character arcs as being psychologically important (and for different reasons); different thematic explorations with different conclusions being drawn (or lack of conclusions) by the implied authorial voice; different authorial techniques being used to communicate different subtextual meanings and producing different effects. Etc. You know the structure of interpreting a text, and you know the structure of teaching a text response and preparing notes, but that doesn't mean you know how best to interpret the writing on the page - and text response is about discussing what isn't literally written in the book, so there's no definitive answer. Instead, we get what we think are 'answers' to the text by developing consensus of interpretation over the years - and one awesome source of that is sample prompts (especially VCAA ones), because they give hints as to what others are seeing in the text.

I'm not saying this to freak anybody out: it's just the way it works, and it's why doing a new text is fun, and a little liberating, but also a challenge. Because you have slightly more room for individual interpretation, but you also are being marked by an examiner who has their own interpretation of the text, and that will influence their reading of your work - and you know that you and that examiner don't have too many common touchstones yet, simply because they don't yet exist.

So I agree that the OP should absolutely approach the text in their own way and try to find their own meaning, but I'm also supportive of their desire to know what other people are thinking they see in the text. There are practice essays out there, but it's odd if any of them come from prior to this year: it's a recent text, an Australian text, and I don't believe it's ever been on any major curriculum, secondary or tertiary, before this year. So there's just not the critical heritage yet to guide us in our interpretation and preparation - which means it's slightly easier to be caught out by a prompt where you think, "Oh shit, I totally hadn't thought of that." (As well as being slightly more liberating for individual approaches.)