English Extension
Students completing English Extension 2 are asked to complete a completely original major work across a range of forms. These can include podcast or film productions, creation of a suite of poetry, composition of a piece of creative nonfiction, fiction, or a critical response. In 2024, both students chose to compose significant critical responses based on areas of interest to them. Their responses were approaching 5000 words in length and included a reflection statement, as well as three assessment tasks throughout the course focused on their conceptual, research, and creative processes.
Michael Krizan
The Resurrection of the Auteur: A Critical Response on the Inevitable Rise of Metamodernism in Film
Modern film has reached critical mass – if it is not a garish extension of a superhero cinematic universe, a remake of a 1980s blockbuster, or an adaptation of a best-selling novel, then is it worth producing? Michael Krizan’s critical response highlights the state of modern cinema, where the competing influences of Postmodernism and Modernism have left audiences in confusion. Do audiences continue to sneer at universal experience at the expense of representations of commonality? Or do we lull ourselves into believing singular narratives that narrow our appreciation of culture and the human experience? However, Krizan shifts the focus to the emerging paradigm of Metamodernism, which synthesises these two 20th-century pillars of thought. This synthesis is framed through analysis of contemporary films Everything Everywhere All at Once, French Dispatch, and the imitable instant classic Barbie. Ultimately, Krizan’s essay suggests that when it comes to film, we can indeed have the best of both worlds.
Daniel Staal
The Contemporary Bildungsroman: A Post-Bourgeois State in between Postmodernism and Metamodernism
Literature will always have its archetypes: the fatally flawed hero, the damsel in distress, character’s meeting symbolic and literal crossroads, the raging internal and external conflict between good and evil. These tropes welcome audiences as if they were an embrace from a long unseen friend. What is more familiar to us,then, than the time-honoured Bildungsroman? The Germanic roots of the phrase stand for “formation” and “novel”; these are the very stories that are meant to define us. These stories are entwined within our development and the texts within the genre should represent the core of our beings. Of course, the contemporary world does not allow for such simplicities. Daniel Staal’s essay acts with dual purpose: to prompt a reconsideration of the genre and champion its contemporary revitalisation. Through an examination of diverse contemporary texts from outside the typically considered Western paradigm, Staal establishes new branches within a field of knowledge relating to a mainstay of the literary world. This response itself had its own formation journey, beginning as a fictocritical response before shedding these elements to present in its final analytical form, providing readers with an exciting glimpse into the new directions of the Bildungsroman genre.