English prosody and poetics

Posted on by Eric Weiskott

My individual graduate tutorial, English Prosody and Poetics, 1300-1600 (syllabus), will run this spring. This tutorial is a practical and theoretical introduction to issues in late medieval and sixteenth-century poetics. Here are the learning objectives for each unit:

1. Introduction to Verse History and Historical Poetics

Learning objectives: Theoretical understanding of the history of metrical study and the key concepts ‘rhythm’ and ‘meter’; comparison of intrinsic (formal/practical) and extrinsic (historical/cultural) approaches to metrical form; practical understanding of modern syllabic meters.

2. The Alliterative Tradition in its Eighth Century

Learning objectives: Theoretical understanding of the history and cultural contexts of the alliterative meter in the late medieval period; comparison of competing explanations for the existence of fourteenth-century alliterative poetry; comparison of the use of the alliterative meter in two compositions, Piers Plowman and St. Erkenwald; practical understanding of alliterative b-verse meter.

3. Chaucer’s Tetrameter

Learning objectives: Theoretical understanding of the history and cultural contexts of the tetrameter or octosyllable in the fourteenth century; comparison of more and less strictly syllabic accentual English meters; practical understanding of template meter or dolnik.

4 & 5. Chaucer’s Pentameter, Tail Rhyme, and Prose

Learning objectives: Theoretical understanding of the history and cultural contexts of Chaucer’s decasyllable/pentameter in the fourteenth century; comparison of Chaucer’s several meters and two staged discussions of form (after Sir Thopas and in the Parson’s Prologue); understanding of the relationships between metrical form and manuscript form in Sir Thopas; comparison of Chaucer’s metrical choices in the larger context of his ‘metrical landscape’; practical understanding of Chaucer’s decasyllable/pentameter.

6. Chaucer’s Pentameter in the Fifteenth Century

Learning objectives: Theoretical understanding of the history and cultural contexts of Chaucer’s decasyllable/pentameter in the fifty years following Chaucer’s death; comparison of Chaucer’s metrical habits to those of his literary heirs, Hoccleve and Lydgate; understanding of the critical uses of, and historical problems with, the concept of a ‘Chaucerian tradition’ extending into the fifteenth century; practical understanding of Lydgate’s decasyllable/pentameter.

7. (Chaucer’s) Pentameter in the Sixteenth Century

Learning objectives: Theoretical understanding of the history and cultural contexts of the decasyllable/pentameter in the sixteenth century; comparison of Chaucer’s metrical habits to those of Wyatt, Surrey, and Shakespeare; understanding of Martin Duffell’s concept of ‘the Italian line in English,’ with reference both to Chaucer and later versifiers; critical scrutiny of sixteenth-century perceptions of earlier and contemporary meter as expressed by Gascoigne and Puttenham; practical understanding of Wyatt’s decasyllable/pentameter.

a plea for pronunciation

Posted on by Eric Weiskott

My note, “A Plea for Pronunciation,” appears in a special issue of Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Teaching (SMART) devoted to Old English pedagogy, edited by Haruko Momma and Heide Estes. This special issue of SMART (22.2, 2015) grew out of a 2012 workshop at New York University. Here’s the opening paragraph:

The correct pronunciation of Old English is an essential skill. “Correct” here refers to an internally consistent approximation of the sounds of the language as reconstructed by historical linguistics and attested by scribal orthography. The present note confines itself to the West-Saxonized koiné used in most Anglo-Saxon literary manuscripts. Many new students and some professors of Old English seem to be of the opinion that pronunciation is an arcane and at any rate artificial reconstruction, a distraction from the larger literary-historical or aesthetic questions to which Old English literature is usually subjected. However artificial it may be, correct pronunciation equips the inner ear to apprehend Old English literature in something approaching a fluent mode. Without a sense of the language as language, students can only regard the literary monuments as composed of so many sequences of letters to be laboriously matched, one by one, to corresponding sequences in a dictionary. There are at least five good reasons to teach correct pronunciation.

The note concludes by providing four resources for further study of the pronunciation of Old English, which I reproduce here:

Baker, Peter S. “Pronunciation.” The Electronic Introduction to Old English.

Barney, Stephen A. Word-Hoard: An Introduction to Old English Vocabulary. 2d ed. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985.

Hasenfratz, Robert, and Thomas Jambeck. Reading Old English: A Primer and First Reader, 7-25. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2005.

Weiskott, Eric. “Precepts,” recording read aloud in Old English to accompany Jay Parini, “Precepts.” In The Word Exchange: Anglo-Saxon Poems in Translation, ed. Greg Delanty and Michael Matto, 231-37. New York: W. W. Norton, 2010.

displaying a ‘genius’ for the digital humanities

Posted on by Eric Weiskott

The Boston College Chronicle recently published an article about my use of Poetry Genius as a learning tool in an undergraduate Chaucer seminar. Here are the opening sentences:

The works of poet Geoffrey Chaucer, widely considered the greatest English poet of the Middle Ages, got a 21st-century spin by students recently in a class on the Father of English literature taught by Assistant Professor of English Eric Weiskott.

Using the “Lit” category on the “Genius.com” website — which Weiskott describes as “a large digital collection of lyrics and texts that can be annotated with text, images, and video in real time” — his students were assigned to each contribute 10 annotations to the site’s texts of Chaucer’s masterpiece The Canterbury Tales, the central work in his Chaucer course.

Weiskott brought the students’ work to the attention of Genius.com’s director of education, who was so impressed that he “generously offered to send us T-shirts,” Weiskott said, which were distributed in a recent class.

My students ran with this assignment, combining their newfound expertise in Chaucer with their digital literacy. As the fall term draws to a close, I am finding that each student’s ten Genius annotations make an ideal starting point for final paper brainstorming.