Your reality

1. Your reality Who has been told a story they later found out wasn’t true? What was this story about? What happened to make you see/hear/discover the truth? Why do you think they told that story in the first place? What was its purpose? Who was it for? How do you feel about it now?

2. Factors that shape reality • People see an event from different perspectives for different reasons- these are shaped by: • Time (period/era) • Memory • Age • Gender • Location • Experience • People can therefore remember or experience an event or moment in different ways. • We call this a shared reality.

3. Application: Writing Task (Example for discussion: Moving House from a child and adult’s perspective.) Write a short paragraph (in first person) on a moment from your childhood. Think carefully about what a child would like dislike about the day. Now add a second paragraph from a different perspective. How might the parents experience it? What might they see and comment on?

4. Summary • How are the adult and child perspectives different? • What might an effect be of people seeing this situation differently? • Does the reality of a situation change as we change?

6. Why do people see the same picture with different eyes? Culture Whose Reality?

7. Vocabulary Subjective/particular/point of view/limited perspective Versus... Objective/general/all-seeing/God/infinite perspective

9. Glossary Perspective: position: a way of regarding situations or topics Perception: sensing: becoming aware of something Memory: the cognitive processes whereby past experience is remembered Reality: the state of being actual or real or the state of the world as it really is rather than as you might want it to be (this is where it gets tricky!)

10. Key Idea: Perspective Our Position: a way of regarding situations or topics Prompt: Our perception of ourselves changes over time

11. Perspective This refers to where we are as you interpret or reflect on issues or events It could also refer to what you were most focused on at the time. So it also connects to memory and how we remember things… (confused yet?)

12. Writing on the context The context ‘Whose Reality?’ requires us to ask and answer these questions. • Whose point of view are we being shown? • What has influenced their point of view? • What are they hiding? • What aren’t they aware of? • What is the nature of reality and how human beings perceive it?

13. The Matrix Apply the questions to these clips • Red and Blue Pill http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=te6qG4yn-Ps • What is Real? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnEYHQ9dscY&feature=related The Spoon http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dzm8kTIj_0M&feature=related

14. Your answer needs • A contention OR • A thesis OR • A moral message • You need arguments and evidence to support this statement.

15. You need a basis for your view • A quote that defines a philosophical approach- ‘There are no facts, only interpretations’ - Nietzsche • A media interpretation- Inception, The Matrix, Black Swan • A reference to the selected text that shows you can frame your ideas in the same way as the text suggests

16. Memoir • A form of autobiography that focuses on a specific event or sequence of events from the author’s life. (Rather than their whole life). • Examples: Shark Net, Ashes Tour Diary by various Australian Cricket Captains, Lazarus Rising by John Howard, This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolfe. • Memoirs are entirely subjective, though at times will claim to be objective. It is their perspective on what they see as significant in an aspect of their life.

17. Literary Memoir • Some memoirs are better than others. Authors who are natural writers often write memoirs that can feel like fiction narrative. • They will often have an interesting opening and contain descriptive passages that are both reflective, and use figurative language with great skill.

18. Features • What features are there in a memoir? • What does it suggest about the reality present in the memoir? • First person perspective • Details around specific, life changing or life affirming events • Past tense • Strong use of description to set the scene (especially at the start) • figurative language (metaphor, simile, analogy) • Adjectives and descriptions that capture the atmosphere; smells, feel, sounds and sight. • Emphasis on reflection. The writer tries to capture the scene as they remember it but also comments on how they feel about the moment now. This helps to communicate to the reader how important the moment was and how it changed them in someway. It based on memory and entirely subjective. Good reflection in a Memoir though will attempt to capture other points of view from those there.

19. An example of a faux (fiction) memoir Maestro by Peter Goldsworthy First impressions? Misleading, of course. As always. But unforgettable: the red glow of his face - a boozer's incandescent glow. The pitted, sun-coarsened skin - a cheap, ruined leather. And the eyes: an old man's moist, wobbling jellies. But then ... the suit: white linen, freshly pressed. And - absurdly, in that climate - the stiff collar and tie. 'Herr Keller?' 'Mrs Crabbe?' I stood behind my mother outside his room at the Swan, perched on a wooden balcony overlooking the beer garden. The hotel - a warren of crumbling weatherboard, overgrown with bougainvillea - was packed, the drinkers and their noise spilling out of the front bar into the garden. Up the stairs, second on the right, a barman had shouted - and every face in the bar had turned and followed us up. One or two drunken whistles had also followed us up; whistles living far beyond their sexual means, my mother later reported to my father, contemptuously.

20. 'This is Paul,' she said, pushing me forward, ignoring the noise below. The figure in the white suit stood aside from his doorway, and motioned us inside. 'Of course. Your father has told.' The accent was thick. Continental, my father had described it, vaguely. A voice that reminded him of grilling sausages: a faint, constant spitting of sibilants in the background. 'Sit down,' the voice hissed. 'We will talk.' A problem: how to capture that accent here? Vevill talk? It's tempting - too tempting - to slip into comic-book parody. We haf ways off makink ...

21. Example of a literary memoir This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolfe Fortune Our car boiled over again just after my mother and I crossed the Continental Divide. While we were waiting for it to cool we heard, from somewhere above us, the bawling of an airhorn. The sound got louder and then a big truck came around the comer and shot past us into the next curve, its trailer shimmying wildly. We stared after it. "Oh, Toby," my mother said, "he's lost his brakes." The sound of the horn grew distant, then faded in the wind that sighed in the trees all around us. By the time we got there, quite a few people were standing along the cliff where the truck went over. It had smashed through the guardrails and fallen hundreds of feet through empty space to the river below, where it lay on its back among the boulders. It looked pitifully small. A stream of thick black smoke rose from the cab, feathering out in the wind. My mother asked whether anyone had gone to report the accident. Someone had. We stood with the others at the cliff's edge. Nobody spoke. My mother put her arm around my shoulder. For the rest of the day she kept looking over at me, touching me, brushing back my hair. I saw that the time was right to make a play for souvenirs. I knew she bad no money for them, and I had tried not to ask, but now that her guard was down I couldn't help myself. When we pulled out of Grand junction I owned a beaded Indian belt, beaded moccasins, and a bronze horse with a removable, tooled-leather saddle

22. Shark Net Author’s Note This book is both a book of memory and my portrait of a place and time. Memory may falter and portraiture is a highly subjective endeavour, but I have tried to tell a truthful story. A handful of names have been changed for the usual reasons.

23. Written Task Prompt: • Childhood is a mystery we only understand later. Write a memoir drawing on your own personal experience that explores the above prompt. It should be centered on a particular event but be used to more broadly discuss the mature of childhood and reality. It must link to what we have discussed so far about Whose Reality (see next slide). It must use the writing features of a memoir as we have described.

24. Approach from one of these BIG IDEAS: • Memory shapes identity and reality • Imagination reshapes reality Multiple/Shared Reality Do different people experience different versions of reality? Can multiple versions of reality exist at the same time? Can we experience more than one reality in a lifetime?