Teaching Denglisch

[sister_luck]

So, in a break from marking I'm planning ahead for the lessons on Shakespeare's sonnets and modern love songs. Thanks again for your help with that. I'm making some progress, but the German teaching material I have contains vocabulary that I find pretty dubious.

So, here are some questions for those of you who did (English) literature in school and/or at uni. (I'm assuming that would be most of you.) Oh, being a native speaker of English would help, but I'm curious to know which terms you were taught in school in other countries.


Poems tend to have what I believe is universally called a speaker in English. In German, there's the rather pretentious term lyrisches Ich. I've seen this translated to lyrical I - that's completely ridiculous and unheard of, right? Please? I don't like it at all!

Then there's rhyme. Which is arranged in a pattern and most definitely not in a rhyme scheme (cf. German Reimschema), right? Also, in German while we do the thing with the letters, we also have words for these patterns, thus abab is called Kreuzreim and aabb Paarreim. I've seen these terms translated into English, but that's not common practice in the English-speaking world, or is it? Especially with regard to Shakespeare's sonnets, we'd use quatrain for the abab form and couplet for two lines that rhyme and do away with cross rhyme etc. altogether.

Vers in German can mean a poem as a whole, but also a single line. In English verse can mean the literary form as opposed to prose and also a group of lines that from a unit, synomynous with stanza, and especially in songs the parts that do not form the chorus, which apparently is both in German and English also called refrain though the word seems to be much rarer in English.

Are these assumptions correct?

Comments

[paranoid-blonde.livejournal.com]

No lyrical I! Just the first person narrative/first person speaker.

Then you have a rhyme scheme indeed! Rhyme scheme is correct! Quatrain and couplet are right, aabb=rhyming couplets!

Stanza is best for a part of a poem separated from the rest, like a paragraph would be in literary form. Verse tends to be used in a different way...it's hard to explain, but I was banned from using the word verse when doing poetry for GCSE...

[sister-luck.livejournal.com]

Hiya, and thank you!

Thank god that lyrical I is out. It's disgusting.

Ooops, so rhyme scheme does work in English, too. (It gets really confusing after you've been reading teaching material full of gems like lyrical I.)

Yeah, I go for stanza usually, too - I was actually going to ban the word verse, because my students tend to think it means line. Seems like I'm not the only person who doesn't want their students to use it.

And yes, asking these questions makes me seem rather stupid, I DO know my literary analysis stuff most of the time - this is just a question of usage, because I want to confidently tell my students that 'cross rhyme' and 'lyrical I' are bullshit (though I'd probably use a different word with them...)

[paranoid-blonde.livejournal.com]

Not stupid. It's allowed!

And only too glad to help!

[sister-luck.livejournal.com]

Thanks a lot! You've been a great help.