HSC English. The smart way to prepare for your HSC.

This one-day HSC English preparation course focuses on Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (first performed 1954) for the Common Module: Texts and Human Experiences.

The course will review the context, content and structure of the play in relation to representation of individual and collective human experience. Related issues include contradictions and paradoxes in human identity, and how literature can challenge assumptions and ‘ignite new ideas’.

The review of the play begins with context: Miller’s response to McCarthyism and the Cold War period is both a modern tragedy set back in the period of the witchcraft trials in Salem in 1692, and a warning against political hysteria about Communism and a failure of freedom in America in the 1950s. Initial discussion focuses the ‘historical analogy’, its pros and cons and relevance to the present.

Analysis of the story of John Proctor and his wife and Abigail explores the play as a representation of individual and collective experience with a focus on politics and religion, sex and marriage, collective instability and corruption, and individual responsibility. Analysis of selected passages explores Miller’s commentary about public order versus individual freedom; his view of political history; authority and questioning of authority, including religion and politics like religion (with Pr