Context (from an article in 2010 issue Metaphor by Eva Gold and Wendy Michaels) tion of abt The representation of ideas, issues, values in texts is closely connected with the no’ well that the context. This word is often used loosely in common parlance so it 1s as makes clear its angle on the concept — viz. “the range of personal. social. histoncal, cul Ee and workplace conditions in which a text is responded to or composed”. In other words texts are composed and responded to in particular contexts and the conditions of these contexts influence the ways in which people compose and respond to the texts. Cc S ea f graphy. There The notion of context. in this usage, clearly distinguishes itself from literary biography. There is no suggestion that the poem accurately reflects the life of the poet — although conditions in the life of the poet may well have shaped aspects of the poem. Likewise the text is not simply a social text, nor a cultural manifesto, nor an historical document. Rt verisimilitude, the novels Emma and Pride and Prejudice are neither autobiographies nor social, cultural, historical documents of the Regency Peried: rather. they are an individual author’s depictions, or portrayals or representations of issues associated with aspects of lite in that period. In the syllabus’s terms, textual representations are never context free neither are texts simply photographic representations of the context. egardless of their In addition to these elements, the notion of context takes into account the “workplace” conditions in which a text is composed (and responded to). While this may easily be dismissed as only applying to the texts dealt with in the Fundamentals or Standard courses, for filmic, dramatic and multimedia texts the workplace conditions assume particular significance. Consider, for a moment, a playwright such as Shakespeare. whose dramatic writings were produced for a particular workplace: all-male players that trod the boards with minimal rehearsals, having been issued with only their own words rather than a full script, threats of censorship from Westminster, the Wooden O on Southbank with its large thrust stage, two door entrances, auditorium open to the weather, close proximity of audience to players, and so on. It is easy to see how such workplace conditions have contributed to shaping aspects of Shakespeare's dramatic work, particularly devices such as aside and soliloquy — those speeches in which the players directly addressed the audience. However, the strength of the syllabus lies not only in its valuing of how context shapes the work of the “composer” — but also in the recognition of the effects of context on the reading of texts. Let’s stay with the soliloquy for a moment. We know that this dramatic device worked very well on Shakespeare’s stage and we can see, in Hamlet’s soliloquies, for instance, how Shakespeare used the device to elicit response from the audience. However, let’s flip forward a few hundred years and see how this device has been read in other contexts. In the nineteenth century, the period of the great revival of Shakespeare’s dramatic output, theatres no longer sported thrust stages with audiences in sufficiently close proximity to interact with the players: instead the audience was seated in darkness and distanced from the proscenium arch stage, and in early twentieth century. cinema the presence of the actor was merely a flickering image on a screen so that no interaction with the viewer was possible. How did the Shakespearean director “read and receive” the soliloquy in such workplace conditions? One answer was to re-construct the soliloquy as an interior monologue — the character talking to himself! (Few female characters score soliloquies, or epilogues as Rosalind points out). So when Romeo poses the question, “Shall I hear more, or shall I speak at this?” it is not to an audience, as on Shakespeare’s stage, but to himself that he speaks. This rendition affects our perception of Romeo’s character: rather than the young impetuous lover seeking the advice of the audience members (who would probably have encouraged hisrashness) in this interior monologue version, Romeo is construed as more introspective, more carefully weighing up the consequences of his actions. The syllabus urges us to be aware. and to make our students aware, how contexts of various composers (writers and directors) shape the work they produce. However, the syllabus also issues us with a veiled waming about the concept of context: the word “is used in its broadest sense”. The syllabus links it to the various “conditions” or circumstances in which the composer or responder is situated. This reminds us that we need to be wary of assuming that a composer's or responder's context is an immutable, bounded entity. Just as historical periods do not have fixed starting and finishing dates, contexts do not have fixed boundaries. The fluidity of contexts comes from the ways in which individuals in any social and cultural situation engage with, and discourse about, significant issues and values. If we think about the conditions in our own contemporary context — Australia in the twenty-first century — we might determine ways in which issues and values about tradition, truth, the individual, democracy, national identity and so on are currently being examined and debated. Many individuals might be concerned with these issues but not everyone upholds the same values and the texts they produce — spoken, written, visual — reflect these differences. Nowhere is this more evident than in recent texts generated in the wake of the “Cronulla riots”. Similarly, the texts consumed by individuals in one context will not necessarily be interpreted in the same way by all those individuals. Herein lies the excitement and the challenge of the syllabus in terms of classroom implementation. We cannot, nor should we expect all our students to “read” and interpret a text in the same way we do. For instance, in approaching Harwood’s poem “Prize Giving”; as a teacher working in a situation of awareness of child protection, one might focus on the sexual innuendoes of some of the imagery associated with Eisenbart and the girl; another who has experienced academic pomposity might read the poem in terms of the intellectual arrogance of Eisenbart; a student with a dislike of authority might focus on the gutsy challenge that the titian-haired girl throws at the ultimate authority figure; while another might be more moved by the allusions to musical and artistic genius juxtaposed with Eisenbart’s apparently scientific bent. None of these interpretations are “misreadings”: they simply give emphasis to particular aspects of the central tussle between Eisenbart and the titian haired girl. In each case, the challenge for the teacher is to encourage the reader to identify the “conditions” in the context that are shaping his or her reading and how these might direct each to responding to particular features of the text.