Outsider Related Texts

For the most of us year 11 has been a challenging start to our senior years of high school. Most if not all of our courses started to delve into deeper topics to enrich our understanding of the subject and its relation to the world around us. In English, we investigated the relationships between context, purpose, and audience and how these relationships influence texts and their meanings. The three texts I will be talking about today in my presentation are How Seventeen Undermine Young Women, the image ‘How Can Anyone Love Me? and The Outsider.

The text I found the most challenging of the three was The Outsider by Albert Camus. The novel revolves around the main character, Meursault, and how he embraced the absurdity of existence. In this

The society in the novel has a set of rules which everyone must follow, from values of family to love to religion. When individuals do not value such things, they are immediately seen as a threat to that society. I understand that because Meursault is different, he is discriminated against, such an issue is sadly still relevant in our current society. The Outsider covers course concepts such as how the influence of text structures and language features are used to represent ideas, events and people. Throughout the entirety of the novel where Meursault described the events and people around him, Camus used short sentences to express the main character’s lack of emotional response, such text structure is a big contrast to the way he describes the weather, the environment, and nature. I found it interesting how the author has manipulated the difference in text structure to show that Meursault is indifferent towards the events around him, however he is not inhuman or simple minded. I have a lot of mixed feelings towards this text, as the idea of absurdism explored in it and the way the main character lives his life is quite interesting, but the way such ideas and character was, and needed to be, was presented in too dull of a

These texts were particularly interesting to me as I believe that the issues are so relevant to our current society as we are constantly surrounded by social media. The article focuses on the magazine Seventeen, which is aimed at a young audience, and how it reinforces society’s expectation that girls should be more concerned about their appearances and ability to gain approval from men rather than developing their own place in the world. To communicate the negative influence of media, Phillips uses techniques such as expert opinions from people like Professor Carol Gilligan from Harvard University and bias information to add more credibility to her arguments and support her views on the issue. She also used simple language instead of high vocabulary as to appeal to her target audience, young