#text: troilus and criseyde

[isabelpsaroslunnen]

As an early modernist, it's always bizarre to see so much writing advice along the lines of "I just wish more writers read broadly enough to understand the fundamental distinctiveness of original characters and story lines in fiction writing, the thing that separates true literature from all other forms of fiction writing..."

I mean, I wish people read broadly enough to understand that the value for originality as the foremost defining quality of publishable fiction is bound up in deeply modern assumptions driven by capitalism and intellectual property law, but none of us get everything we want, I guess!

...But seriously, even if you restrict yourself to English-language literature, please read some fiction written prior to 1700 before forming arguments about the fundamental nature of fictional literature through all of time and space. You don't get Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida without Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, and you don't get Chaucer's Criseyde without Boccaccio's.

This isn't simply loose inspiration in the way that all things have inspirations, but active engagement with a very specific character and plot none of them had invented. Chaucer's version of Criseyde in particular is very much in dialogue with other iterations of her, and the sympathy and nuance he brings to the character really rewards familiarity with the Cressida figure as usually depicted—a familiarity he could, at the time, expect his audience to have.

That kind of intertextuality was extremely normalized at the time as a general rule, not only when it came to specific works or authors, and would be so for centuries afterwards. In fact, fiction writing involving pre-existing characters and plots was a common element of fiction written in English for far longer than capitalism has existed. We are still closer in time to when Shakespeare was writing Troilus and Cressida than he was to the medieval source of the story.

[iohannesrhetor]

fourteenth century apology video

I was explaining the premise of Chaucer's Legend of Good Women to my son (poor kid). In its prologue, Chaucer explains how women have been attacking him for slandering the honor of women and being an enemy to love on account of his depiction of Criseyde in Troilus and Criseyde(*), and Chaucer basically says he'll make up for it by writing a book about virtuous and faithful women.

My son says to me "wait, are you saying Chaucer invented the ukulele apology video in the 1300s?!"

All the way dead. Love that kid.

(*leaving a lot out here about how problematic these texts are and how Chaucer is-- my 'fave is problematic' like they used to say)

[zielenna]

12 and 17 :)

Hi! :)

I think you heard most of this already, but here goes.

12. Any books that disappointed you?

Quite a few! I tend to avoid books I am not confident I will enjoy, but it still happened. First one was Lee Mandelo's Summer Sons, which I only read 70 pages of. And you know, that one is on me, I should have known that a novel marketed as a follow-up to Dream Thieves would not be great, but I thought it would make a decent breezy summer reading, and I was compelled by the premise of estranged friends, ghosts, campus politics, southern gothic, and blood magic. And to be fair, the campus part was almost solid; I do believe that the author had been in a graduate program. But the prose was so clunky! It was possibly the worst-written book I read in the last couple of years. It wasn't just unremarkable, it was so bad that I had difficulty parsing it, and I am quite sure that wasn't intentional.

Unfortunately, my quest for a novel with ghosts intervening between estranged friends led me to another disappointment, Bryan Washington's Family Meal. I was mostly bothered by two things. First, there was much of "therapy-speak," both in dialogue and in narration. People told one another that the other person didn't get to say X to them, and apologized each other for trauma dumping. Second, possibly as a result of the author's other stylistic choices (spare, simple prose; limited access to characters' interiority), the descriptions of various locales and characters' actions were dominated by proper nouns - so I knew the exact demographic make-up of every neighborhood they drove through, I knew the names of Japanese ingredients they cooked with, and I knew that the love interest was Thai and used they/them pronouns - but I couldn't tell you anything about their personality. This made the novel feel rather flat.

17. Did any books surprise you with how good they were?

Well, because I am so picky, I am rarely positively surprised… Zola's Bête humaine surprised me with how well it was constructed. I can't recall it in detail as it's been a while since I read it, but I remember being impressed with how intricately the various plotlines were interconnected, how self-contained each chapter felt, and how effectively they cumulated. It felt very clean, like a classical tragedy. The novel also had a very striking center, towards which the plot and the characters gravitated, and from which the violence which the novel examined had originated. Funnily enough, Zola seems not to have been aware of it, as the novel explicitly provides a different account of the original crime - one which accords with his ideas about heredity, but isn't really persuasive.

Other than that, I was surprised by how much enjoyed Esther Yi's Y/N (it was even more to my taste than I expected) and, frankly, the Chaucer texts that I read this fall. I don't recall having a strong response to him in my undergrad, and it took me long weeks in the summer to read Troilus and Criseyde when I was assigned it in my second year. But now I had a really good time!

Actually, it was every easy for me to compate Y/N to Family Meal, which reinforced my opinions of both.

Y/N, a character's first impression of Seoul: "I drew aside the little curtain at my window. The proportions were startling. Row after row of perfectly rectangular apartment towers—thirty floors on average—obscured my view of a mountain range. Entire families were sitting on leather couches as high up as mountains. When the Han River appeared alongside the elevated track of the highway, I was shocked by its breadth. The river was a giant black snake with a muscular back, winding through the constructed landscape with a calm magnanimity I found menacing."

Family Meal, a character's first impression of Tokyo: "The publisher flew me to Tokyo to work with Hana on her edits. We’d been given a three-month deadline. But she and I spent most of our days in tiny dives around her neighborhood instead. We rode bikes past the financial district. We ate dinner with her ex-boyfriend, a stocky guy with dyed hair who blushed at the sight of me. The rest of the time, I slumped in the sento beside my rental in Setagaya, wading in the bathwater beside salarymen and shop owners and bankers."

I told you that what struck me in Y/N was its resistance to cliche. And that is a stylistic choice I sympathize with more than with the transparency of Family Meal.

[emptymanuscript]

You know... Gaiman just kind of beautifully summed up my issues with death of the author and authorial intent and all that jazz.

It's not that he's dead, he clearly isn't, and it's not that he has a right answer and the readers have to find it. It's that their answers are valid because they're doing the work. And a set answer from the author accidentally or intentionally invalidates their work. The work of finding meaning is valuable beyond the answer it yields.

The students are sub-creators (or co-creators if you want to go to the extreme opinion like me) of the story. He is the author. He sets up the boundaries of the text that everyone has to work within. It's like making up the rules of the game. Having done that, it is the reader's playground, their task to see what they can perceive in the text, what they have put into the text, why they have done those things, and are there other equally valid more interpretations. And as long as they follow the rules, the text, any play they engage in, interpretation, is valid.

I kind of resent the idea that there is a single right answer for literature. I agree that there is a right answer FOR YOU but that's a very different thing. For all that literature lovers bleat that literature is art and complex and not the simple memorization of facts or the inevitability of a word problem there does often seem to be a driving need to have a singular correct interpretation that everyone should agree on. And I feel like that's shortchanging the idea of art. How much lesser is a piece of art that can only be felt one way compared to a complexity that can live as richly in every individual interpretation of every single reader.

I really hit this idea when I was lucky enough to get Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and then Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida one right after the other from two different college professors. Same basic "story" but radically different takes from the different authors. And the real beauty of it was that it was possible for us students to have different takes from the same exact text without a contradiction in text. If the author doesn't say exactly how something happens, the reader fills it in. So we all have to work from Cressida saying a particular line of text but how she says it, how she is blocked, what the facial reactions are, that's up to us and the story changes on our opinions. So I could have a different interpretation, completely valid from the textual evidence, influenced from the comparative experience of Chaucer's Criseyde. I had a kinder view of Cressida than most of the other people in my Shakespeare class and the debate between us, while no one was right or wrong, enriched all our readings.

I, frankly, would have been bitter if Shakespeare had shown up and said no, you can't empathize with Cressida, I wrote her to be a tool for manipulation and that's it.

Art is a dialectal experience. It's not that one answer is right or the other one is. It's that my answer is correct for me AND your answer is correct for you AND someone else's answer is correct for them so long as all of us can get to that answer from the text. That's why literature is powerful.

Hello Neil.

My friends and I (11th grade) recently read your short story “Other People” in English class. The class is locked is currently locked in debate as to whether the demon and the man are the same person, and whether the man who comes in at the end is the same as the man at the beginning. Please resolve this debate as we are on the verge of killing each other.

Thanks you!

I love that literature still has power to make people think and feel and care in this day and age.

[dwarrowdams]

I'm working on a topic for the research paper in my MLIS class and it essentially boils down to me brandishing a copy of Troilus and Criseyde in one hand and As Schoolboys from their Books in the other and shouting "THESE ARE THE SAME!!!"

[dwellordream]

Pluralizing Love in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde

“Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde is one of the first texts in English extensively deliberating on the subject of love in the fictionalized ‘novelistic’ form of the romance: The double sorwe of Troilus to tellen,/That was the kyng Priamus sone of Troye,/In lovynge, how his aventures fellen/Fro wo to wele, and after out of joie,/My purpos is … (I.1–5) 

This ‘double sorrow’, Troilus’s ‘unsely aventure’ (I.35), his ‘cas’ (I.29) of a Fortune-dependent rise and fall, is precisely taken by the narrator of the romance as the ground of deploying, debating and performing ‘love’ as a topic apt to rouse pity in the alleged hearers of the tale: ‘And for to have of hem compassioun’ (I.50).

As a consequence, love finds itself described as an uncontrolled, and uncontrollable, emotion triggering off intratextual – figural – emotions such as sadness and joy as well as extratextual – readerly – ones such as fear and pity. It is the basis of performing passion. In the romance, ‘love’ is first introduced through an object of perfection. 

Following the idea of the divine ideal, Criseyde is described by the narrator as some heavenly being: Criseyde was this lady name al right./As to my doom, in al Troies cite/Nas non so fair, forpassynge every wight,/So aungelik was hir natif beaute,/That lik a thing inmortal semed she,/As doth an hevenyssh perfit creature,/That down were sent in scornynge of nature. (I.99–105) 

Criseyde is seen as ‘heavenly’, ‘immortal’ and ‘perfect’, which brings into play the contemplative aspect of love, whereas the idea of ‘scorn’ already introduces a potential Petrarchist aspect into the poem. The idea of perfection is further corroborated by her portrait which states that ‘In beaute first so stood she, makeles’ (I.172), which creates the opportunity for the young Troilus, ‘this fierse and proude knyght’ (I.225), scornful of love and its effects, to arouse the God of Love’s wrath and to immediately fall in love: Yet with a look his herte wex a-fere,/That he that now was moost in pride above,/Wax sodeynly moost subgit unto love. (I.229–31) 

Love finds his way through this ‘look’, piercing Troilus’s ‘eye’ (I.272) through hers (‘hire yen’, I.305), presenting him with ‘nevere … so good a syghte’ (I.294) of ‘Honour, estat, and wommanly noblesse’ (I.287), which makes him exclaim: ‘O mercy, God,’ thoughte he, ‘wher hastow woned,/That art so feyr and goodly to devise?’ (I.276–7) 

…In thus juxtaposing the ‘Platonic’ and the ‘Petrarchist’ discourse of thinking and arguing about love, Chaucer begins to produce a non-hierarchical, that is ‘aesthetic’ plurality that clearly goes against a single ideological will to truth normally connected to historical discursive practices. He begins to construct, as well as deconstruct, different historical ways of speaking about love, opening up some kind of discursive (or rather adiscursive) game of abeyance apt to articulate several – figural, narratorial, authorial – truths about love at the same time without having to decide which will eventually have to be seen as the ‘right’ one.

This represents the kind of openness and undecidability that Jonathan Culler, among others, has identified as the place, and potential, of ‘literature’. This possibility of deconstructing truths, of circumventing discursive authority by a non-discursive (or counter-discursive), ‘literary’ language use, has already convincingly been claimed with regard to Petrarch’s work, notably his Canzoniere, as an instance of ‘poetic fiction’, that is literature, being ‘the systematic site of all work of deconstruction’. 

It introduces the idea of a no longer ‘functional’ (pragmatic) but rather ‘autonomous’ (dysfunctional) variety of fiction, suspending ‘realities’, inventing alternative truths and opening up other possibilities than the ones seemingly obviously at hand.”

- Andreas Mahler, “‘Potent Raisings’: Performing Passion in Chaucer and Shakespeare.” in Love, History and Emotion in Chaucer and Shakespeare: Troilus and Criseyde and Troilus and Cressida

[the-busy-ghost]

I love comparing different literature in slightly different dialects/languages from the same rough time period, even though I know approximately nothing about linguistics and very little about literary analysis

For example, the below texts, the first three from the last quarter of the fourteenth century and the fourth from the early fifteenth.

So you have the beginning of John Barbour’s “The Brus”. Barbour was probably resident in Aberdeenshire in the north-east of Scotland and his poem may have been prepared for a Scottish courtly audience c.1375:

Then quite a bit further south you have the magnificent alliterative work Gawain and the Green Knight, anonymous but written in the dialect of the north west Midlands of England and dated sometime c.1375-1400. Please ignore the scorings and silly notes of my younger self.

Then the opening verses of “Troilus and Criseyde”, composed in the 1380s by Geoffrey Chaucer, who hailed from Kent in the south-east of England and was possibly writing for an English courtly audience:

Then lastly, the “Kingis Quair”, which was probably written in the 1420s or 1430s and therefore is considerably later than the other three but I’m including here as it is alleged to have been written by James I of Scotland, who, however, had spent his formative years in a prison in England, so there’s a rather unique voice:

To be fair I know it’s no good comparing printed versions really- not only are some of the earliest manuscripts of these poems considerably later than their composition date (and the language of the scribe may have been different to that of the author) but each editor of a modern printed edition has their own conventions (for example the editor of “The Brus” removed most of the yoghs and thorns and replaced them with modern ‘y’ and ‘th’). Not to mention each poet is constrained by their material- not least the Gawain poet, who has to meet the demands of that rich alliterative verse.

But I still find it’s a fun exercise for a novice like me, picking through the poems and finding similar words and phrases and seeing where they differ in spelling or meaning.

Also I would like to eat the words of Gawain and the Green Knight with a spoon

[aegor-bamfsteel]

Crocodile tears: To display insincere sadness. A few ancient and medieval writers believed that crocodiles would cry while eating their victims.

Bring home the bacon: To earn a living or achieve success. This expression dates back to 1104 when a nobleman and his wife dressed themselves as peasants and asked the local Prior for a blessing for not arguing after a year of being married. In response, the Prior gave them a side of bacon. Afterwards, the nobleman gave land to the monastery on the condition they gave couples who accomplished the same deed with the same reward

Knock on wood: If you have good luck and want to keep it. Cosman sees this expression deriving from pre-Christian times, when people performed rites “to inspire spirits dwelling in wood or trees, such as the maypole, or to awaken them after winter slumber, as with the divinities affecting agriculture and human life.”

Hocus pocus: Doing a trick, usually said by a magician. This actually derives from words spoken in Latin during a Mass: when a priest lifted up the eucharist to his parishioners, he would say “Hoc est corpus domini,” which means “This is the body of the Lord.”

Lick into shape: To bring into satisfactory condition or appearance. In medieval bestiaries, you would find an unusual description of bears and how they give birth to their young.

On the carpet: It now means to call upon someone doing bad things. However, its origins in French (‘sur le tapis’) is that it was customary to put a carpet on a banquet table, which was often the centre of conversation.

Buckled down to work: To focus on your job. It comes from medieval warriors having to make sure their armour was buckled and safely on before going out to battle.

Out-Herod Herod: To exceed in violence or extravagance, inspired by the Biblical character. Even before it was used by Shakespeare in Hamlet, the expression could be found in medieval mystery plays.

A long spoon: To keep a safe distance from danger. Cosman notes that in medieval lore, “the best kitchen or banquet implement for supping with the Devil was a very long-handled spoon.”

Goose is cooked: When someone is in trouble. This expression has two origin stories. In one of them, it is ascribed to the Christian reformer Jan Hus when he was burned at the stake in 1415. In the other version, the 16th-century King of Sweden, Eric XIV used the phrase when he burned down a town that he was besieging after they had mocked him by putting out a goose along the walls.

Crow’s feet: A reference to the fine lines that appear around your eyes as you age. The English writer Geoffrey Chaucer is credited with first using the expression In his work Troilus and Criseyde

Food for worms: To be dead and buried. One can see this expression in the Ancrene Wisse, a thirteenth-century monastic text

[uwmspeccoll]

 Typography Tuesday

POST-WWI PRINTING IN ENGLAND

We return to Printing of To-Day: An Illustrated Survey of Post-War Typography in Europe and the United States, printed at the Curwen Press in 1928, and published by Harper and Brothers in New York. and Peter Davies Limited in London (a publishing house founded in 1926 by Peter Llewelyn Davies, one of the Llewelyn Davies children befriended by J. M. Barrie, and whose name was the source for Barrie’s Peter Pan).

This week we feature specimens from the section “Printing in England,” by British printer typographer Oliver Simon (1895–1956), the managing director of the Curwen Press and co-founder of the influential typography journal The Fleuron. Simon writes:

The majority of books in England are set by Monotype or Linotype machine. . . . The Monotype machine is, in my opinion, better adapted to printing the finest quality. . . . Moreover, the Monotype Corporation has a better selection of type faces to offer printers than its rival, although . . . both corporations fall short of what might be expected of them. . . .

There are no CONTEMPORARY Book-types worthy of note: printers are in advance of typographers. It is not easy to believe that there are not designers who could do good work if encouraged. . . . To-day, the two type corporations. . . have for all practical purposes a monopoly! Is it too much to ask them to commission modern types? . . . The plates that follow . . . may give a hint of what English printing will achieve in the near future if printers and publishers will have faith in their own age.

Fortunately, Simon would see his desired outcomes achieved during his lifetime. Once again, as image captions are still not appearing in the Tumblr dashboard, we list them here from top to bottom:

1,) Title page for Ernest Gimson: His Life and Work, printed in Caslon types by the Shakespeare Head Press, with an illustration by F. L. Griggs.

2.) Title page for Robert Graves’s Welchman’s Hose printed in 1925 at the Curwen Press for The Fleuron in Monotype Imprint.

3.) Page from Pompey the Little printed in Caslon with a wood engraving by David Jones at the Golden Cockerel Press.

5.) Page from William Meinhold’s Sidona the Sorceress, with an illustration by Thomas Lowinsky, published in Monotype Garamond by Ernest Benn for the Cambridge University Press.

6.) Opening page for Poor Young People, printed by the Curwen Press for The Fleuron in Monotype Caslon and illustrations by Albert Rutherston.

7.) Title page from Two Poems by Edward Thomas, designed by Percy Smith, and printed in 1927 at the Curwen Press for Ingpen & Grant in Caslon and Stephenson Blake open capitals.

8.) Opening page from Horati Carminum Libri IV, with illustrations by Vera Willoughby and Koch Kursiv type, printed by the Curwen Press for Peter Davies.

9.) Title page for Passo Domini printed in Caslon with wood engravings by Eric Gill at the Golden Cockerel press in 1926.

10.) Page from Geoffrey Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, printed in Caslon at the Golden Cockerel Press with wood engravings by Eric Gill.

11.) Half title and text page from The Receipt Book of Elizabeth Raper, with illustrations by Duncan Grant, printed at the Kynoch Press in Monotype Baskerville and Stephenson Blake open capitals for the Nonesuch Press.

12.) Title page from The Poems of Richard Lovelace, printed in Fell types at the Oxford University Press in 1925.

View examples of Continental printing from Printing of To-Day.

View our other Typography Tuesday posts.

[theamericanparlor]

Wrestling with Shakespeare is good for the brain. Scientists have shown that reading the Bard and other classical writers has beneficial effects on the mind.

Works from Shakespeare, Chaucer, Wordsworth and D H Lawrence challenge readers because of their unusual words, tricky sentence structure and the repetition of phrases.

English professors at Liverpool University who teamed up with neuroscientists armed with brain-imaging equipment found that this challenge causes the brain to light up with electrical activity. Professor Philip Davis, who led the study at the university's department of English, said: "The brain appears to become baffled by something unexpected in the text that jolts it into a higher level of thinking.

They were also able to identify that the Shakespeare sparked activity across a far wider area of the brain than "plain" text, with the greatest concentration in a key area associated with language in the temporal lobe known as the Sylvian Fissure.

The researchers claim that techniques such as unusual sentence structure can also stimulate the brain. In the poem Troilus and Criseyde, Chaucer uses parenthesis to throw the reader off. He says: "Men say - not I - that she gave him his heart."

[keepcalmandstudy]

My Oxford Finals Papers

Hello! Here’s a much requested run-down of the papers I took for my finals! There are 2 streams you can choose between after your first year of Oxford English - Course 1 and Course 2. I went for Course 2 - chosen far less than Course 1 but I found it to be incredibly rewarding! 

Paper 1 - Literature in English, 650-1100 (Old English)

- Exam in Trinity Term (3rd and final term), 3rd year, 3 essays in 3 hours

- College taught in Michaelmas Term (1st term) of 2nd year and then revisited for revision 

- Focus: Cynewulf's runic signatures concluding his female saints' lives (Juliana and Elene), Ælfric's Catholic Homilies (particular focus on his life of Cuthbert), Old English metrical charms (particularly those found in the margins of MS CCCC 41)

- I LOVE OLD ENGLISH!!!! That is all I have to say about this one, I looooove it

Paper 2 - Medieval English and Related Literatures, 1066-1550 (Romance)

- Exam in Trinity Term, 3rd year, 2 essays in 3 hours

- Faculty taught in Hilary term (2nd term), 2nd year, and then revisited for revision 

- Focus: Magic and the supernatural in the First Branch of the Mabinogi (medieval welsh), Marie de France's Lais (particularly Lanval and Milun; medieval French) and Walter Map's King Herla (Latin); The flexibility of the Middle English Sir Gowther in its varying manuscript contexts

- This paper was a challenge because it’s completely unlike anything I’ve done before. Because it was 2 essays in 3 hours (rather than the usual 3), topics had to be much broader and explored in greater depth. You’re also handling different languages too (although you can work with them in translation, but that does make the way you approach analysis different to the way it would be approached if you’re working with the original) and it’s a genre (rather than time period) paper. This is one of the reasons that I really liked Course 2 - while with Course 1 all the papers are time period ones, Course 2 spices things up a bit and I think that enables you to develop a broader skillset.

Paper 3 - Literature in English, 1350-1550 (Middle English)

- Exam in Trinity Term, 3rd year, 2 essays and 1 commentary in 3 hours

- College taught in Michaelmas and Hilary Term, 2nd year and then revisited for revision

- Focus: Authority and translation in Robert Henryson's Morall Fabillis, Gavin Douglas' Eneados and David Lindsay's 'The Testament and Complaynt of Our Soverane Lordis Papyngo'; Affective piety in Middle English Marian lyrics and related material culture; Set commentary passage from Chaucer's ‘Troilus and Criseyde’

- The topics I explored for this paper were really interesting - I thoroughly enjoyed it. I messed up my timing in the exam but hey ho, these things happen! 

Paper 4 - The History of the English Language to c1800

- Coursework, submitted Trinity Term, 2nd year

- An essay and a commentary, both 2000-2500

- Formatted like a 'take-home exam' - questions are released and you choose 2 and have about 2.5 weeks to write and submit

- Faculty taught in Hilary and Trinity Term, 2nd year

- Chosen Questions:

Essay - In historical research, there are no 'bad documents' (HIPPOLYTE TAINE). Discuss.

Commentary - 'Nothing reveals the deficiencies of a language more surely than translating into it' (CHRISTIAN KAY). Provide a close analysis of the language of TWO texts which seem to you to reveal or contest that claim.

- Similar to the Romance paper, this one was unlike anything I’ve done before! It was a bloody challenge at first because of it being such an enormous leap up, especially having never done any linguistics before. In the end though, I loved it and I explored some really interesting topics!

Paper 5 - The Material Text

- Coursework, submitted Hilary Term, 3rd year

- A commentary and an essay, both 2000-2500 words

- Formatted in the same way as the English Language paper, but they're considering changing this to be more like your standard coursework

- Faculty taught in Trinity Term, 2nd year, and Michaelmas Term, 3rd year

- Chosen commentary folio:

- Chosen essay question: 'The introduction of error into the transmitted text is often regarded as a random and unpredictable phenomenon related to human frailty' (L. NEIDORF). What other alternatives are there? Give specific examples.

- I loved this paper (are you spotting a pattern here? haha) - getting to see so many real manuscripts up close was fascinating and I feel so lucky to have gotten to see some of the collection in Oxford! Perhaps controversially I chose this option over Shakespeare (!) but I’m so glad I did. I figured I could go back to Shakespeare at any time during my life, but seeing these manuscripts was a one-time opportunity.

Paper 6 - Special Options: Writing Lives

- Coursework, submitted Michaelmas Term, 3rd year

- A 6000 word essay

- Taught by 2 tutors running this specific option (there were a bunch of options released and you had to submit your top 5 - you’d then hopefully be given your 1st choice)

- Focus: The extent to which a writer's temporal moment affects the way they approach writing about mental health. Helen Macdonald's H is for Hawk; Thomas Hoccleve's Complaint and Dialogue

- Ironically, my own mental health went a bit haywire during the term in which I took this paper which was a shame, but hey ho, ya win some ya lose some, and I really enjoyed the texts we got to read for it. I kind of wish I’d chosen a more medieval option but I did manage to incorporate some medieval stuff in there with Hoccleve. The teaching and submission all being in 1 term is a bit ridiculous in my opinion too.

Paper 7 - Dissertation

- Coursework, submitted Hilary Term, 3rd year

- An 8000 word essay

- Undertaken from the end of 2nd year

- Abstract: 'For my dissertation, I will be examining twelfth-century texts (such as Instructions for Christians and the First Worcester Fragment) that speak back to those from the Anglo-Saxon past, considering inheritance from the poetic and homiletic traditions. Building on and developing from the work of Hugh Magennis, I will look at the way light imagery in such late Old English and Post-Conquest texts functions both literally and metaphorically, and how these two functions intersect. I will also consider how such texts engage in dialogue with material culture, examining artefacts such as The Gloucester Candlestick.'

- It was cool being able to research my own topic and produce something from that research. My supervisor was amazing too!

Overall, I really enjoyed the course. My tutoring, especially from my Balliol tutor, was outstanding - she really did go above and beyond for me. I didn't enjoy the writing of the longer pieces so much but I did enjoy the texts I looked at and it's definitely worthwhile to develop the skill of writing longer pieces I think. I loved the rest of my papers, especially Old English! On the whole it was a great course!

If you have any questions about any of this, feel free to ask!

[isabelpsaroslunnen]

[Original date: 6 March 2018]

My seminar topic is a mystery.

[wizdomtooth]

"Whitney notes numerous treacherous men from Greek mythology, including Sinon (who persuaded the Trojans to bring the Trojan horse into the city, thus causing the downfall of Troy), Eneas (who abandons his lover Dido), Theseus (who deserted Ariadne), and Jason (who abandoned Medea, after she saves his life on countless occasions). Whitney encourages her lover to be not like these men, but like Troilus, who faithfully died loving Criseyde. After Whitney makes her list of unfaithful men, she addresses the virtues she hopes her lover's wife will have, so that he does not regret his decision. She hopes this wife will have: the beauty of Helen, the chastity of Penelope, the constancy of Lucres, and the true love of Thisbe. Whitney tells her lover that aside from Helen's beauty, she possesses all of these qualities, she only wishes she had Cassandra's gift of prophecy so she could see whether he ends up misfortunate, or she does. Although Whitney clearly feels abandoned, she takes the moral high ground by wishing her lover the best, and offering him relationship advice. She completes her poem, or letter, as a morally virtuous woman, and not a victim."

city of troy. aphrodite. ariadne. hecate. and the jason... helen. penelope. 'misunderstood love' and 'forbidden love'. "'Star-crossed' or 'star-crossed lovers' is a phrase describing a pair of lovers who, for some external reason, cannot be together." "(The original texts of the prologue, Q1 and Q2, use the spelling 'starre-crost', but the version 'star-cross'd' is normally used in modern versions.)" "[aside from Lucres' constancy]" and true love. because what is that. do i have it. need it. want it. believe in it? aphrodite, ariadne, hecate, helen, penelope. harry, will, henry, jake, patrick.

[poetryhandbook]

CHAPTER 2 - FIVE- TO TWELVE-LINE FORMS

Iambic pentains (abbab)—Larkin/Annus Mirabilis:

https://allpoetry.com/Annus-Mirabilis

Iambic pentains (a8b6c8c8b6)—Coleridge/The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43997/the-rime-of-the-ancient-mariner-text-of-1834

Sestet/pentametric quatrain + couplet (ababcc)—Shakespeare/Venus and Adonis:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/56962/venus-and-adonis-56d239f8f109c

Sestet/tetrametric (abbcac)—Larkin/An Arundel Tomb:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47594/an-arundel-tomb

Rhyme royal–heroic heptet (ababbcc)—Chaucer/Troilus and Criseyde:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/257/257-h/257-h.htm

Rhyme royal—Wyatt/They Flee From Me:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45589/they-flee-from-me

Rhyme royal—James I/The King's Quire:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44442/the-kings-quire

Rhyme royal—Shakespeare/The Rape of Lucrece:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50474/the-rape-of-lucrece

Rhyme royal—Wordsworth/Resolution and Independence:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45545/resolution-and-independence

Rhyme royal—Auden/Letter to Lord Byron:

https://arlindo-correia.com/lord_byron.html

Rhyme royal—Auden/The Shield of Achilles:

https://poets.org/poem/shield-achilles

Octet—tetrametric cross-rhymed (abab-cdcd)—Macauley/Horatius:

https://englishverse.com/poems/horatius

Octet—tetrametric single-rhymed (abcb-defe)—Tom O’Bedlam’s Song:

http://www.thehypertexts.com/Tom%20O%27%20Bedlam%27s%20Song.htm

Octet—Tetrametric bobbed (aaab6-cccd6)—Snodgrass/Magda Goebbels:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/42798/magda-goebbels-30-april-1945

Octet—irregular trimetric (abcd-efgd)—Larkin/MCMXIV:

https://www.poetrybyheart.org.uk/poems/mcmxiv/

Octet—tetrametric couplet-rhymed (aabbccdd)—Marvell/The Garden:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44682/the-garden-56d223dec2ced

Octet—tetrametric couplet-rhymed (aabbccdd)—Marvell/Upon the Hill and Grove at Bilbrough:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48331/upon-the-hill-and-grove-at-bilbrough

Octet—tetrametric couplet-rhymed (aabbccdd)—Marvell/Upon Appleton House:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44689/upon-appleton-house-to-my-lord-fairfax

Triolet (1231-4512/abaa-abab)—Henley/Easy is the Triolet:

https://allpoetry.com/Easy-is-the-Triolet

Triolet—Hopkins/The Child is Father to the Man:

https://poets.org/poem/child-father-man

Triolet—Cope/Valentine:

https://gladdestthing.com/poems/valentine

Ottava rima—heroic octet (abababcc)—Byron/Beppo:

https://poetryarchive.org/poem/beppo-extract/

Ottava rima—Byron/Don Juan:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43833/don-juan-canto-11

Ottava rima—Yeats/Sailing to Byzantium:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43291/sailing-to-byzantium

Ottava rima—Yeats/Among School Children:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43293/among-school-children

Spenserian stanza—linked heroic quatrains + alexandrine (abab-bcbc-c12)—Spenser/The Fairie Queene:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45192/the-faerie-queene-book-i-canto-i

Spenserian stanza—Keats/The Eve of St. Agnes:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44470/the-eve-of-st-agnes

Spenserian stanza—Shelley/Adonais:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45112/adonais-an-elegy-on-the-death-of-john-keats

Spenserian stanza—Tennyson/The Lotos-eaters:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45364/the-lotos-eaters

Ten-line stanza (abab-cde-dce)—Keats/Ode on a Grecian Urn:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44477/ode-on-a-grecian-urn

Ten-line stanza (abab-cde-cde)—Keats/Ode on Melancholy:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44478/ode-on-melancholy

Ten-line stanza (abab-cde-c6de)—Keats/Ode to a Nightingale:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44479/ode-to-a-nightingale

Eleven-line stanza (abab-cded-cce)—Keats/To Autumn:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44484/to-autumn

Multi-line stanzas (12/11/12/14/18)—Keats/Ode to Psyche:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44480/ode-to-psyche

Douzaine (12 lines)—stacked couplets—Bradstreet/To My Dear and Loving Husband:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43706/to-my-dear-and-loving-husband

Douzaine—cross rhyme + arch rhyme (abab-cddc-efef)—Tennyson/Mariana:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45365/mariana

6 couplet sonnet—Shakespeare/Sonnet 126:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/50649/sonnet-126-o-thou-my-lovely-boy-who-in-thy-powr

[skyeventide]

on classism and sexism in the establishing of English literature and its canon as university subjects, and how to make a student hate it:

If the tendency to view English literature as if it were a historical progression of worthy authors determined the University of London syllabus until well into the twentieth century, the ancient English universities, once they got round to establishing chairs and then courses of study, felt obliged to make English acceptable by rendering it dry, demanding, and difficult. The problem began with the idea that English was a parvenu subject largely suited to social and intellectual upstarts (a category which it was assumed included women). In order to appear ‘respectable’ in the company of gentlemanly disciplines such as classics and history, it had to require hard labour of its students. In the University of Oxford in particular, the axis of what was taken to be the received body of English literature was shifted drastically backwards. 

The popular perception of a loose canon, like Arnold’s, which stretched from Chaucer to Wordsworth (or later Tennyson), was countered by a new, and far less arbitrary, choice of texts with a dominant stress on the close study of Old and Middle English literature. Beyond this insistence on a grasp of the earliest written forms of the English language, the Oxford syllabus virtually dragooned its students into a systematic consideration of a series of monumental poetic texts, all of which were written before the start of the Victorian age. 

In the heyday of the unreformed syllabus, in the 1940s, the undergraduate Philip Larkin was, according to his friend Kingsley Amis, driven to the kind of protest unbecoming to a future university librarian. Amis recalls working his own way resentfully through Spenser’s Faerie Queene in an edition owned by his college library. At the foot of the last page he discovered an unsigned pencil note in Larkin’s hand which read: ‘First I thought Troilus and Criseyde was the most boring poem in English. Then I thought Beowulf was. Then I thought Paradise Lost was. Now I know that The Faerie Queene is the dullest thing out. Blast it.’

[disturbingbookclub]

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