Wednesday, September 2, 2015

Two Quick Announcements

NOTE: The questions for Parts III & IV of "The Knight's Tale" are BELOW this post. 

TWO THINGS: One, remember that the Welcome Back Picnic for the English department is THIS THURSDAY (tomorrow) in Faust 159 from 4-5pm. It's an Ice Cream Bar this year, so stop by and enjoy wonderful deserts that people in Chaucer's time could have never envisioned--or enjoyed!  

And Two, I've posted the handout from today's class (Wed) below in case you missed class or left it on the table (as a few of you did!). You might want to use this in a future paper, or reference it for a future exam.  Click the "Read More" tab below to see it...
 Satire and “The Knight’s Tale”

Love hath his firy dart so brenningly
Y-sticked thrugh my trewe careful herte,
That shapen was my deeth erst than my sherte!
Ye sleen me with your eyen, Emelye!
Ye been the cause wherefore that I die! (Part II)

BATHOS: “Greek for depth, and it has been an indispensable term to critics since Alexander Pope’s essay On Bathos: Of the Art of Sinking in Poetry…the word ever since has been used for an unintentional descent in literature when, straining to be pathetic or passionate or elevated, the writer overshoots his mark and drops into the trivial or the ridiculous. Among his examples Pope records, “the modest request of two absent lowers” in a contemporary poem:

Ye Gods! annihilate but Space and Time,
And make two lovers happy.

The slogan “For God, for Country, and for Yale!” is bathetic because it moves to intended climax in its rhetorical order and to unintended descent in its reference—at least for someone who is not a Yale student. The greatest of poets sometimes fall unwittingly into the same rhetorical figure. In the early version of The Prelude (1805) William Wordsworth, after recounting at length the tale of the star-crossed lovers Vaudracour and Julia, tells how Julie died, leaving Vaudracour to raise their infant son:

It consoled him here
To attend upon the Orphan and perform
The office of a Nurse to his young Child
Which after a short time by some mistake
Or indiscretion of the Father, died.” 

(from M.H. Abrams,  A Glossary of Literary Terms)

Remember, BATHOS is the opposite of PATHOS, which is “the passions, or suffering, or deep feeling” in a work of literature. In short, something pathetic (in the old sense of the word) moves us to deep emotions or tears—it gives us gooseflesh. Something bathetic¸ on the other hand, makes us laugh from an unintentional attempt to create pathos. It’s anticlimactic or simply misfires as poetry.  The trick to being a good reader is to sense the difference between the two. Sometimes, the difference can be subjective, but often a writer or poet uses bathos consciously to illustrate a character or idea. Don’t assume that all poetry is meant to be taken seriously/pathetically: poets like to laugh at their creations, too! 

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