‘FUTURE WORLDS’ CONTEXT STUDY 2014 CONTEXT STUDY YEAR

CURRICULUM AND ASSESSMENT

AREA OF STUDY 2 – CREATING AND PRESENTING The focus in this area of study is on reading and writing and their interconnection. Students will read these texts in order to identify, discuss and analyse ideas and/or arguments associated with the selected Context. Students will then draw on the ideas and/or arguments they have gained from the texts studied to construct their own texts.

OUTCOME 2 On completion of this unit student should be able to draw on ideas and/or arguments suggested by a chosen Context to create written texts for a specified audience and purpose; and to discuss and analyse in writing their decisions about form, purpose, language, audience and context.

TASK Section B requires students to complete an extended written response. In your writing, you must draw on ideas suggested by the Context Encountering Conflict. Your writing must draw directly from at least one selected text that you have studied for this Context ( ‘Fahrenheit 451’ in Semester 1 and ‘Fahrenheit 451’ and/ or Film Text Semester 2) and be based on the ideas in the prompt. Your response may be an expository, persuasive or imaginative piece of writing.

EXPOSITORY WRITING This style of writing is designed to explain, explore, analyse or to give information. Typical forms include an essay, feature article, non- fiction prose, lecture transcript and report.

PERSUASIVE WRITING This style of writing is designed to persuade, argue, rebut, encourage action or inspire. Typical forms include an argumentative essay, letter to the editor/ opinion article or persuasive speech.

PERSONAL/ IMAGINATIVE WRITING This style of writing is designed to entertain, divert, describe, reflect, encourage reflection and explore. Typical forms include a narrative, poem, descriptive writing or journal entry.

WARNING!!! This task requires a sophisticated response in language, form and purpose. It is not simply a ‘creative writing’ task and requires careful consideration of the response to the prompt and the link to the text.

ASSESSMENT Produce one piece of writing in response to one of two prompts. Your writing must have implicit or explicit reference to ‘Fahrenheit 451’ (Semester 1) and ‘Fahrenheit 451’ and/ or Film text (Semester 2). You may also draw on other material. Your response may be expository, persuasive or imaginative. You must complete a written explanation which identifies your choices in regards to form, audience, purpose, context and language.

Your written explanation is only a requirement of the SAC. You are asked to explain your choices in regards to form, audience, purpose, context and language. In order to do this, you need to have thought of reasons for your choices.

Your work is assessed on the extent to which it blends together the ideas of the text, the prompt of the context and a sophistication in writing/ expression. Writing Prompt Ideas

This means that a response that focuses on one area at the cost of the other two will not score highly. Writing Prompt Ideas

FUTURE WORLDS

REFLECTIONS What ideas help shape our view of the future? What relationship does the future have with the present? When presented with ideas of the future what reactions does it prompt and why? What ‘wrongs’ might a future world attempt to right?

‘FAHRENHEIT 451’

DYSTOPIAN FICTION Utopian fiction is the creation of an ideal world, or utopia, as the setting for the novel. Dystopian fiction is the opposite: the creation of a nightmare world or dystopia. Many novels combine both, as a metaphor for the different directions humanity can take. They are often also described as speculative fiction - speculating on what the future might be like.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT Published 1953 Written in the years post WWII when the atrocities of the Nazis had come to light. Rise of McCarthyism and anti-Communist sentiments. Cold War

PLOT SUMMARY Guy Montag is a Fireman who believes he is content in his job, which consists of burning books and the possessions of book owners. Clarisse McClellan, a teenage girl and his new neighbor, challenges Montag’s view of happiness. Mildred, Montag’s wife, spends her days engrossed in the three full walls of interactive TV (“the family).

Back at the Firestation station, Montag is threatened by the Mechanical Hound, a robotic hunter that can be programmed to track any scent. Montag asks Beatty if there was a time when Firemen prevented fires, instead of starting them. Montag is disturbed when an elderly woman, whose neighbour has turned her in, refuses to leave her house as they douse it with kerosene. She lights a match herself and burns along with the house.

Haunted by the vision of the old woman's death, and by the news of Clarisse's death, Montag doesn't go to work the next day. Beatty visits him at home and delivers a long lecture on the history of censorship, the development of mass media, the dumbing down of culture, the rise of instant gratification, and the role of Firemen as society's "official censors, judges, and executors." When Beatty leaves, Montag shows Mildred twenty books, including a Bible, that he's been hiding in the house. He feels that their lives are falling apart and that the world doesn't make sense, and hopes some answers might be found in the books.

But reading is not easy when you have so little practice. Montag, however, remembers a retired English professor named Faber whom he met a year ago and who might be able to help. Faber is frightened of Montag at first, but eventually agrees to help Montag in a scheme to undermine the Firemen. They agree to communicate through a tiny two-way radio placed in Montag's ear. Montag forces Mildred’s friends to listen to him read a poem by Matthew Arnold from one of his secret books. They leave, greatly upset. Montag hands over a book to Beatty and is apparently forgiven. Suddenly, an alarm comes in. The Firemen rush to their truck and head out to the address given. It's Montag's house.

Mildred is the one who called in the alarm. Beatty forces Montag to burn his house with a Flamethrower, and then tells him he's under arrest. Beatty also discovers the two-way radio and says he'll trace it to its source, then taunts Montag until Montag kills him with the Flamethrower. Now a fugitive and the object of a massive, televised manhunt, Montag visits Faber, then makes it to the river a few steps ahead of the Mechanical Hound. Along some abandoned railroad tracks in the countryside, Montag finds a group of old men whom Faber told him about—outcasts from society who were formerly academics and theologians. They and others like them have memorized thousands of books and are surviving on the margins of society, waiting for a time when the world becomes interested in reading again.

Early the next morning, enemy bombers fly overhead toward the city. The war begins and ends almost in an instant. The city is reduced to powder. Montag mourns for Mildred and their empty life together. With Montag leading, the group of men head upriver toward the city to help the survivors rebuild amid the ashes.

LINKS TO THE PRESENT Bearing in mind that the book was written in 1953, what elements of the present does ‘Fahrenheit 451’ elude to?

THEMES Censorship Conformity v Individuality Influence of Mass Media Happiness The power of thought and ideas