I think if you spent some class time reading some of the text aloud, you could probably get the students comfortable enough with the language to assign the whole work. Reading the selected stanzas phonetically, it's pretty clear what most of the words are, but I imagine you'll still find people 'translating' and rewriting the text to make it easier to read, which will take a lot of time.
i'd gladly continue on it was kinda fun, felt like being in a foreign country with only a passable grasp of its language, and having to fill in a lot of the blanks
i pretty much just have the chaucer experience. i've never liked poetry (except for green eggs and ham) but i seem to recall chaucer appealing to me somehow. (just a note: the chaucer was something we did in senior year AP literature. so, 30-40 kids out of my graduating class of almost 350 had the chaucer exposure.)
this stuff doesn't seem too hard, but i think at 150 i might want to be done with it. is there some compromise between 150 lines and 1400 lines?
also, i second the suggestion to read the text aloud.
I completely loathe struggling through things I can't read easily, so I'd grit my teeth to get through even the 150 lines. But you didn't ask whether it was fun, you asked whether it was hard!
I guess it would have to depend on which words get glossed. fwiw, these are the ones I couldn't easily guess, I think--
rody, clere, tofore, lyte, craft. Rynsid is rinsed, right?
I agree with all the reading it aloud suggestionskeeweeJanuary 2 2008, 15:11:42 UTC
I've taken classes where we've had to read poems at that level of difficulty. My BritLit professor's advice was to read it aloud and define the word by the word it sounds like, and disregard what it reads like. I thought that was helpful.
How much time would they have with the 1400 lines? I was doing my BritLit class during an intensive summer session and I found it difficult.
Re: I agree with all the reading it aloud suggestionstigermilkdrunkJanuary 2 2008, 15:20:20 UTC
I'll definitely try to get them to read it aloud, although one of the groups, especially, has trouble with that sort of thing. They'll have a week; they're looking at two other poems that week, The Dream of the Rood, which they'll read in translation (it's Old English), and David Lyndsay's The Dreme, which is at about a similar level of complexity, but on which they'll have a full lecture before they see me.
(It's a strangely structured class, because in the first half they get less reading, probably only about 30-50 pages a week, but of really hard stuff language-wise, and in the second half they get whopping great novels every week - I have no idea how they'll get through it all.)
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it was kinda fun, felt like being in a foreign country with only a passable grasp of its language, and having to fill in a lot of the blanks
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i've never liked poetry (except for green eggs and ham) but i seem to recall chaucer appealing to me somehow.
(just a note: the chaucer was something we did in senior year AP literature. so, 30-40 kids out of my graduating class of almost 350 had the chaucer exposure.)
this stuff doesn't seem too hard, but i think at 150 i might want to be done with it.
is there some compromise between 150 lines and 1400 lines?
also, i second the suggestion to read the text aloud.
Reply
I guess it would have to depend on which words get glossed. fwiw, these are the ones I couldn't easily guess, I think--
rody, clere, tofore, lyte, craft. Rynsid is rinsed, right?
Reply
How much time would they have with the 1400 lines? I was doing my BritLit class during an intensive summer session and I found it difficult.
Reply
(It's a strangely structured class, because in the first half they get less reading, probably only about 30-50 pages a week, but of really hard stuff language-wise, and in the second half they get whopping great novels every week - I have no idea how they'll get through it all.)
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