Anyone have a BA in English?

[skb2010]

Posted: 11/30/08 at 9:10pm

Or is anyone really good with poety? I have to analyze "Hymn to the Night" and explain the number of feet each line. And I have NO idea what that means.

[jasonf]

Posted: 11/30/08 at 9:23pm

Feet are a measure of emphasis.
For example, from Shakespeare:

But SOFT what LIGHT through YONder WINdow BREAK.

Each foot of this, iambic pentameter (the most common type), has an emphasized and de-emphasized syllable, giving the line five feet.

[tommyboy]

Posted: 11/30/08 at 9:25pm

oh GOD, GIVE it to me PLEASE, AGAIN

[skb2010]

Posted: 11/30/08 at 9:29pm

Thanks jason

[nexttoelectric]

Posted: 11/30/08 at 9:37pm

I have a BA in English and I couldn't tell you what feet were.

[TheatreDiva90016]

Posted: 11/30/08 at 9:40pm

Another thread about feet?

Is this a theme or something?

[SueleenGay]

Posted: 11/30/08 at 9:49pm

nexttoelectric, that is frightening. Seriously.

[nexttoelectric]

Posted: 11/30/08 at 9:56pm

I took poetry classes and feet never once came up.

I guess my professors weren't fans of anatomical descriptors.

[SueleenGay]

Posted: 11/30/08 at 10:07pm

Never? Or did you just skip those days? Shakespeare? Pentameter? Nothing?

[nexttoelectric]

Posted: 11/30/08 at 10:20pm

I took 5 shakespeare classes. albeit, none of them were about structure, but feet were not discussed. We discussed feet in other ways, but the term "feet" never came up.


ETA

I also have a BA in Drama, and again, no feet. Updated On: 11/30/08 at 10:20 PM

[SueleenGay]

Posted: 11/30/08 at 10:28pm

That really is amazing, electric. What school/s did you attend? I really am curious. I am not slamming YOU, but you got a degree in Theatre AND English and never learned scansion?

[SueleenGay]

Posted: 11/30/08 at 10:49pm

Look here (particularly #7 and 8.)

http://www.ehow.com/how_4558272_scan-poem-meter.html

A little more detail here:

http://www.uncp.edu/home/canada/work/markport/best/study/poetry.htm

[nexttoelectric]

Posted: 11/30/08 at 10:50pm

I understand and learned meter and how to work with emphasis and beats, but terms like feet never came up.

Both my degrees are from Hofstra University.

Having looked up scansion, i did learn that, but never under the title of scansion.

[george95]

Posted: 11/30/08 at 11:19pm

I have a degree in English Lit. from the University of Illinois at Chicago, and I'm currently the chairman of the English Dept. of a high school.......

And I would say out of all the poetic devices out there, the foot is definitely one of the less important ones. In my experience, it was taught in high school, but hardly at all in college. It's kind of like grammar--you learn about compound/complex sentences in 4th grade, but then when you're writing papers in college, it really doesn't come up.

[skb2010]

Posted: 11/30/08 at 11:39pm

Do you diagram at your school george?

[SueleenGay]

Posted: 11/30/08 at 11:41pm

I find it hard to believe that any actor who has studied Shakespeare in a University did not have scansion drilled into them.

[nexttoelectric]

Posted: 11/30/08 at 11:53pm

Well, believe it sueleen. Again, I didn't study performance of Shakespeare (i was in a production of Julius Caesar but took no classes on performance of shakespeare). Most of my shakespeare classes were generic lit courses, early plays, late plays, comedies. The two more in depth courses I took were one during a study abroad (so it was kind of truncated) on plays that took place (at least in part) in venice, so Merchant and Othello, and then i took a semester on Lear (how its different in the quarto and folio and about various adaptations and modern retellings).


Like i said, i learned scansion (not under that title) and i've learned many times about meter and emphasis and beats

[bwaylvsong]

Posted: 12/1/08 at 12:11am

Ah, so THAT'S what you do with a BA in English!

[Plum]

Posted: 12/1/08 at 12:14am

I think it's a bit of a mistake to study Shakespeare in any depth without thinking about its performance, but that's a totally OT pedagogy issue.

Stephen Fry wrote a lovely book on all those poetry terms and understanding them, cheesily titled The Ode Less Travelled: Unlocking the Poet Within. I highly recommend it.

[Elphaba]

Posted: 12/1/08 at 12:47am

Jason, I do not know why, but your answer excited me!

[george95]

Posted: 12/1/08 at 1:05pm

My high school teaches diagramming to the lower-functioning freshmen and sophomores.

[vagary66]

Posted: 12/1/08 at 2:43pm

Are you clear on this? I studied English before going back to school for something that will PAY me.

Wikipedia has a pretty good explanation

[LotteTBS138]

Posted: 12/1/08 at 3:58pm

Oh my, and no one was mentioned Princeton!! Isn't that the proper person to ask?

[ray-andallthatjazz86]

Posted: 12/1/08 at 4:22pm

I have a BA in English and currently doing my MA and never ever studied feet. I only took one Shakespeare course (we only studied the plays) and never heard of feet in that course. The only time we studied it was in high school.

[george95]

Posted: 12/1/08 at 4:41pm

When I first arrived as a teacher at the high school 8 years ago, the English Dept. chairman was horrified when I said I didn't know what a compound-complex sentence was. He started going off about "kids today....". I told him I once knew what it was, but it wasn't taught during college. If he would have asked me what a foot was at that point, I probably wouldn't have known either. But, after being a h.s. teacher for just a few months, all those technical terms come back to you easily.