I just took an English Lit. midterm...

....and I feel like I have been intellectually raped with a baseball bat covered in fish-hooks.

25 quotations from assorted texts.

"list author (if anonymous, specify), title of work, and what the signifigance of the quote is in terms of style, plot, literary conventions, characterization, &c."

in 30 minutes.

~1 minute per question.

there were easy ones, like:

"And Naegling snapped." (Beowulf, Anon.)

"This carpenter answerde, "Allas, my wif!
And shall she drenche? Allas, myn Alisoun!" (Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales: The Miller's Tale)

"Send us the timely fruit of this same night." (Edmund Spenser, Epithalamion)

"When Offa's kinsman understood that the earl would not put up with cowardice, he let his beloved hawk fly from his hand toward the woods and advanced to the battle" (The Battle of Maldon, Anon.)

"And this they named the numbles, that knew such terms of art." (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Pearl Poet)

"The nick on his neck he naked displayed." (ibid.)

There were harder ones though.

Everyone was freaking out, thinking it had to be a joke. a minute a question? half the people handed in blank sheets. I got most of the answers, but in terms of completeness, if I was given a few more minutes, I'd have been able to do far better.

The other thing is, he only quoted from maybe eight or 10 of the readings; we did closer to thirty, so my head was polluted by all this other crap that I assumed would be on the test; like middle english lyrics, elizabethan lyrics, all sorts of short little crap things-- I am glad to have read them, but they were a waste of time in terms of studying for the exam.

Now I have to write three different papers, between now and tuesday, comparing different works from the class, and I have a Euro. Lit. midterm on Weds. that's going to be roughly the same deal. (same Prof.)

ouch.

It wouldn't be so bad if I didn't have Goethe and Racine and Tasso and Danté and Poe and Hawthorne and Marmon-Silko and Morrison and all the other nonsense clouding everything.