As all of you finish up your studying, here's a few last minute tips:
- Once again, re-reading all of the words in each of the texts might not be the best way to use your study time. Instead, go back through the texts and look for key passages that you think will be important, or that you think you could write an essay about; remind yourself of the basic order of events in each text, but only focus on what you think is important in the context of the class. Study, in other words, strategically.
- Get those passages straight in your head so that you don't have to flip open the book to re-remember what they were about; the test will be timed (2hrs), and searching for the 100% perfect quote will, more often than not, waste more time than it will save you. I recommend keeping a closed book for the first half, in fact.
- To refresh your understanding of the history of the texts, read the Norton introductions to them, and to the periods. Also, in the Chaucer handouts, it might be helpful to read the bits and pieces of the tales that come before and after The Miller's and the Wife of Bath's tales.
- Practice reading a few sonnets you've never seen before. (Hint: For inspiration, push the Shakespeare bobble-head doll, pictured right.)
- Write some sample questions, and organize the texts and quotations you might use to answer them.
- Practice your facility with meter by reading Shakespeare's Sonnet 12 (pp. 1062-63), and marking the stresses and unstresses... then decide what that meter is emphasizing. I'll note some interesting things about the meter in the comments below.
Sonnet 12 begins with a series of one-syllable words in a very regular iambic pentameter, which mimics the ticking of a clock:
回覆刪除When I do COUNT the CLOCK that TELLS the TIME (line 1).
Most of the poem retains that regular pattern except for in: line 2, where "HIDeous NIGHT" has a scrunched-together double-syllabic "eous," which mimes the hideous breaking of the pattern set up in the first line; line 5, where "BARren" takes the emphasis away from "I" and "see"; line 8, where the first syllable "BORNE" gets a stress, which emphasizes the alliteration of the B's in the line (Borne, bier, bristly beard)--emphasized first syllables are common in sonnets; and, finally, line 13's "TIME'S SCYTHE" is a spondee, which takes the stresses away from "'gainst." Time's scythe is emphasized in this way for it's ruthless interruption of life.