ENGLISH 4620: CHAUCER FINAL LONGER ESSAY ASSIGNMENT

GRADY SPRING 2020

Essays on one of the topics below should be double-spaced (one-inch margins/12-point type) and 1800+ words in length. Be sure to refer as helpfully and specifically as possible to the texts upon which you're basing your argument--and be sure to have an argument or thesis. Your essay should have an original title, and it should not use the word “portray.” Essays are due on Friday, May 1; electronic submissions to my email are preferred (fgrady@umsl.edu).

1. Design your own topic, of suitable specificity and sophistication, about something that interests you in the Canterbury Tales we've read. A brief consultation with the instructor is required for this option; talking with one another is recommended, too, and I’d like to receive a paragraph or email describing your topic by Wednesday, April 29.

2. "By drawing narrators from the genres that define them, Chaucer makes his reassessments of those genres a dramatic process. Like the Wife of Bath berating antifeminist authors and the Squire forecasting the adventures of noble youths, the Franklin speaks a literature by which he has been configured" (Susan Crane, Gender and Romance in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales [1994], p.107). Discuss this dramatic process--that is, the effect Chaucer achieves by producing these potentially self-satirizing stories--with reference to the Knight's Tale or the Wife of Bath's Prologue or the Pardoner’s Tale.

3. Use one of the critical remarks on the Franklin’s Tale [http://www.umsl.edu/~gradyf/chaucer/franklincrit.htm] or the Pardoner’s Tale [http://www.umsl.edu/~gradyf/chaucer/pardonercritics.htm], Nun’s Priest’s Tale [http://www.umsl.edu/~gradyf/chaucer/npt%20critics.htm] or Parson’s Tale [http://www.umsl.edu/~gradyf/chaucer/parson&critics.htm]—or the material from the “Critical Coffeehouse” PDF--as an essay prompt (but do let me know in advance which one you’ve chosen).

4. Write an essay about the interruptions that take place in the course of the storytelling contest. Who gets to interrupt, why do they do it, and are there different kinds of interruption (e.g., authorized and unauthorized)? Can interruptions have non-dramatic or extra-dramatic significance (i.e., explanations that go beyond one pilgrim being mad at another)?

5. “Werk al by conseil, and thou shalt nat rewe,” says Nicholas to John in the Miller’s Tale—in a scene in which he is clearly trying to put one over on the poor old man. Discuss the fictions of advice and scenes of advising we’ve seen in the Tales. Does Chaucer seem to have a particular “take” on the giving (and receiving) of counsel?

6. Kittredge argues in "Chaucer's Discussion of Marriage" the Franklin's Tale provides a suitable conclusion and reconciliation of the issues of marriage that Chaucer writes about in the Wife of Bath's, Clerk's, Merchant's and Franklin's Tales (which Kittredge called the "marriage group"). But there are other Canterbury tales in which marriage plays a role: the fabliau, the Knight’s Tale, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale. Do they have anything significant to add to the discussion?

7 The topic of "gentilesse," and comes up repeatedly in the Canterbury Tales --the Knight implicitly endorses it, the narrator tries to distinguish "gentle" tales from the Miller's ribaldry, the Wife of Bath's Tale sermonizes about it, and the Franklin makes it his abiding concern. What's the big deal? Write about the concept of "gentilesse" in the Tales.

8 What's the function of magic in Chaucerian romance?

9. “…Chaucer uses food, though diversely in diverse parts of The Canterbury Tales, as a unifying shorthand for the festive elements in his poem . . . . In The Canterbury Tales, the social production and consumption of food provides an alternative, circular, and festive ethos which is in dialogic relation with the linear, inner-directed, ascetic dynamics of pilgrimage.” Comment on this claim (drawn from a recently published essay on the Canterbury Tales).

10. What is the place of the Parson's Prologue and Tale in the Canterbury Tales? Are the Parson's remarks anomalous, given what has come before, or are they consistent with the Tales so far? Does he impose (or try to impose) a new and different perspective on the pilgrimage and the contest, or do his remarks make an appropriate conclusion?