Finished!

Yayy!!! We're all done :) :). Congratulations to everyone...

Hey, would people mind if I posted things up here while I'm studying for my Masters? Just to keep it going!!


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A4 Revision Class, Monday at 11, Week 1

Hullo.... You folks going to this lecture tomorrow in Room 10? It's being given by Dr. Gronlie... I think I will go :). Can get you handouts if it'll help!

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A5

What are your topics for A5? Mine are standardisation and lexicon for the essays... and the Biblical passages for the commentary :).

A word of advice from Ayoush the Unready

Hullo.

I was learning some Chaucer quotes today, taking them directly from my essay... Then I realised that there were quite a few spelling mistakes in the quotations-- like 'dawsed' for 'daswed' and Microsoft Word helpfully correcting 'writen' to 'written'. So now I'm just learning quotes directly from the text, or at least checking over the quotations I'd written in my essays.

I'm sure you are both much more careful than me, but just in case-- check your quotes! :)

so, what's with Gower?

Like Chaucer in Canterbury Tales, Gower too uses a frame narrative within which he has many tales, he has a naive first person narrator and a third person figure of authority. But he doesn't have different voices telling his tales from different sources- the tales are all told by Genius and they are mostly Ovidian. While Chaucer plays around with authority and meaning, all the time trying to break hierarchies and moulds, trying to prove that there is no single 'truth' or meaning, but that there are multiple dimensions to every point of view (thus each tale tries to 'quite' the previous one), Gower is eager to establish authority even seeing himself as one, perhaps because he needs to. he is extremely concerned about his political situation, and his poem is closely related to it. He is concerned with issues of kingship and uses the universal theme of love to talk about the need for a balance between excess and deficiency (ie. virtue). Gower has a perfectly structured poem to show the possiblity of harmony in the world. Compare this with the attitude of the Pearl-poet who shows that humans cannot find this harmony, but it is only found in heaven. Gower needs to show that harmony is possible in the secular real world, and interestingly he does not resort to spiritual or religious imagery to prove his case, but instead turns to the pagan classics. One point of comparison between Chaucer and Gower is that the latter allows his tales to be read only through a particular moral, whereas Chaucer's tales open up many layers of meaning. Gower tries to place everything within context; Chaucer argues that the contexts are limitless. but Gower is not all that direct about his frame and context. He has all these 'digressions' on kingship, which suggests to me that their is a greater implicit frame which includes the Prologue. So there are two frameworks, overlapping:
1. Gower + his treatise on kingship
2. Amans, Genius, vices
Gower becomes Amans, Amans becomes Gower.
He uses the lover (individual) to talk about the king (public figure) because they are two aspects of the same person. Man is both social and individual (Dhira Mahoney) thus the kingship and lover aspects are related, and the two frames overlap.

topics for A3?

So what's everyone doing for Chaucer and Gower? I'm a bit clueless about that too. The questions for A3(a) seem mostly thematic and general, and I haven't looked at A3(b) yet. So, for paper (a) I'm thinking...
1. instability of authority and meaning
2. structure or something- maybe "genre"

How are you two planning this paper?

I'm in love with Kevin Whately. It's a bit distracting.

A2 is beginning to seriously concern me, ladies. Particularly last year's question paper, which had 'answer on any text for any question' at the top, and then a list of very vague questions. I was thinking of writing on the Gawain romances/Middle English romances in general/the Pearl poet/Dunbar, but I don't seem able to see these questions as useful for - well, anything, really! Does anyone else think the questions very odd compared to those on, say, A1? Please, please reassure me in some way, here! Gah.

I think I'm just going to go back to watching Morse, now. Every time Kevin Whately does anything at all, I want to fling myself down flights of stairs BECAUSE HE IS SO ADORABLE. And it is four a.m. and I am sick sick sick of worrying about A2.

edited to add: All right - what would you answer from this paper, if you were sitting it tomorrow? http://missun29.offices.ox.ac.uk/papers/2007/trinity/2402.pdf