Verse or Worse? - English tradition of light verse, comic poetry and literary parody 3301-LB1022
This is a one-semester course which will acquaint students with varieties of English comic verse (from Alexander Pope to Wendy Cope) which are often neglected and unrepresented in lectures or on reading lists. An extensive 150-page handout is available to students on the Institute’s Internet page: http://www.angli.uw.edu.pl/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=122&Itemid=78 (Materials for students > Course 1022). The focus will be firmly on poetry (with just a few examples taken from plays or novels), because the subject of comedy in general, even if we restrict ourselves to English literature, is too vast (for instance, J.A. Cuddon lists about two dozen varieties of comedy in drama).
Alexander Pope is a convenient starting point because our students read ‘The Rape of the Lock’ in their first year, so they are already acquainted with the tradition of mock-heroic poetry, but it would be useful to look back to Chaucer and Shakespeare from time to time, to show how the tradition developed through the ages. Students learn about varieties of satirical verse and types of comic verse typical for English literature (limericks, nonsense verse, clerihews, skeltonic verse, puns, black humour, literary parody).
- Humour, amusement, entertainment and what makes people laugh; exaggeration; wit and jokes; from jest-books to stand-up comedy;gags, curtain-raisers, Joe Millers;
- Light poetry / light verse / comic verse; vers de société, occasional verse;
- Humble style and humble characters of comedy;
- Stock characters and stock situations in comic verse;
- Nonsense verse (Lewis Carroll) and the tradition of eccentric verse (the limerick); Edward Lear and others; the learic, the clerihew; Skeltonic (or terse) verse;
- Satire and satirical comedy; moral and corrective purpose of satirical verse;· Farce, comic interludes, mistaken identity and comedy of errors (from Tafespel and intemezzi to bedroom comedy); buffoonery; burlesque; slapstick comedy; ribald verse; bawdy; invective; the epigram and jeu d’esprit;
- Pathos and bathos; bombast and fustian;
- Irony; sardonic humour, sarcasm;
- Puns, punning verses and other types of wordplay (from William Shakespeare and John Donne to W.H. Auden);
- The acrostic and emblematic poems; pattern poetry;
- Jingles, riddles and mnemonic verse; nursery rhymes; doggerel verse; hudibrastics; William McGonagall, the world’s worst poet;
- Macronic verse or Nudelverse;
- Black humour, gallows humour, sick joke and sarcasm; absurdity; tragicomedy, tragic farce, grotesque;
- Parody; literary parody; this will be used extensively in the course because it sets famous poems by English poets (which must be re-read) against a wide variety of parodic possibilities;
- Cento, or patchwork poetry, because it tests the students’ erudition and knowledge of canonical texts of English poetry; found poems. Meters (from monometer to the alexandrine) and their use in comic verse (and serious verse).
Type of course
Learning outcomes
A student will acquire basic information about: Verse or Worse? - English tradition of light verse, comic poetry and literary parody and will develop his/her analytical skills.
Bibliography
T.G.A. Nelson, Comedy: The Theory of Comedy in Literature, Drama and Cinema. Oxford University Press, 1990.
The Nation’s Favourite Comic Poems: A Selection of Humorous Verse, edited by Griff Rhys Jones, London: BBC Books, 1998.
The Oxford Book of Light Verse, edited by W.H. Auden. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939.
The Oxford Book of Comic Verse, edited by John Gross. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
Penguin Comic and Curious Verse, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1952.
The Stuffed Owl: An Anthology of Bad Verse, edited by Wyndham Lewis. New York: Coward and McCann, 1930.
The Penguin Book of Nonsense and Nonsense Songs by Edward Lear. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1996.
An Anthology of Nonsense Verse, edited by Langford Reed. London: Jarrolds Publishers, n.d.
Poetic Parodies, edited by Martin Gardner. Amherst, New York: Prometheus Books, 2001.
How to Be Well Versed in Poetry, edited by E.O. Parrott. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1991.
Wendy Cope, Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis and Serious Concerns. London: Faber and Faber, 1992.
The Teachers and Writers Handbook of Poetic Forms, edited by Ron Padgett. Simon Dentith, Parody: The New Critical Idiom. London and New York: Routledge, 2000.
Additional information
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