ENGLISH 4620: CHAUCER SHORT ESSAY ASSIGNMENT

GRADY SPRING 2020

Essays on one of the topics below should be double-spaced (one-inch margins/12-point type) and 800-1000 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 “relatable.” Essays are due on Friday, February 21; 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 portion of the Canterbury Tales we’ve read so far. A brief consultation with the instructor is required; talking with one another is recommended, too, and I’d like to receive a paragraph or email describing your topic by Monday, February 17.

2. Surveying the portraits of the religious folk described in the General Prologue (Prioresse, Monk, Friar, Clerk, Parson, Summoner, Pardoner) and knowing that later developments may make you want to change your mind, hazard some opinions—or maybe just one opinion?--about the nature of Chaucerian anticlericalism.

3. Trace the application one of these words in the General Prologue: worthy (Knight/Friar/Merchant/Franklin/Wife); curteis-curteisye (Knight/Squire/Prioresse/Friar).

4. The narrator of the Knight’s Tale repeatedly uses the occupatio, which in one sense is not surprising, given its much longer source in Boccaccio’s Teseida. Is his use of the device thematically consistent? That is, does the Knight tend to use the occupatio to condense or skip over a specific kind of material—and if so, what does that habit tell us about his attitude or his angle towards that material?

5. The Knight’s Tale explicitly and successfully celebrates healing power of chivalric ritual and its capacity to bring order to a world beset by chaotic and sometimes malign forces. Doesn’t it?

6. Critics have described how Thebes and its citizens—like Arcite and Palamon-- always represent a principle of disorder in Chaucer’s poetry, a theme to which he repeatedly returns. With the contrast of Thebes and Athens in mind, write an essay about order and disorder in the Knight’s Tale.

7. Write a short essay describing how repetition structures the Knight’s Tale.

8. Hippolyta and Emelye are Amazons, or so we’re told, hardy participants in “the grete bataille for the nones / Bitwixen Atthenes and Amazones.” What in the world happens to them? In other words, how does the Knight’s Tale address matters of gender?

9. I claimed as the start of the semester that the Manciple’s Tale exhibits some of Chaucer’s characteristic interests as a writer: he’s bookish, ironic, interested in storytelling as well as stories; and interested in language, gentilesse, and the relations between the sexes. Pick one or two of these traits and show how they are relevant to either the General Prologue or the Knight’s Tale.