ENGLISH
4620: CHAUCER FIRST LONGER ESSAY ASSIGNMENT
GRADY SPRING 2020
Essays
on one of the topics below should be double-spaced (one-inch margins/12-point
type) and 1800-2000 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 “mindset.”
Essays are due on Friday, March
13; electronic submissions to my email are strongly preferred (fgrady@umsl.edu).
Note: topics from the first set of
prompts are eligible to be used for this assignment, provided that either
you choose a topic you didn’t use during that round.
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 Monday, March 9.
2. Write an essay about the women we've
encountered so far in the Tales
(remembering that one of them, the Wife of Bath, is a pilgrim rather than a
character in a tale). Was Chaucer really, as the 15th-century Scottish
Chaucerian Gavin
3. Here's an alternate way of looking
at gender issues in the Canterbury Tales:
is it possible to describe what Chaucer thinks of men and/or masculinity?
4.
Reread John Gower's "Tale of Florent"
from his Confessio Amantis and
write an essay comparing the ways that Chaucer and his friend and fellow poet
Gower treat the "loathly lady" tale.
(NB: Compare-and-contrast
topics need a thesis too!)
5. The Wife of
6. The Canterbury Tales may be fragmentary and incomplete, but the
fragments themselves often have a certain thematic unity. Write an essay about the common themes,
characters, plot elements, images, and other devices—some of them, anyway--that
help to unify Fragment I (Prologue, Knight, Miller, and Reeve).
7. Another version of #6: The good
feeling and fellowship that characterizes the pilgrims at the end of the General Prologue seems to vanish pretty
quickly once the tale-telling contest begins--the Miller at once tries to
"quite" the Knight's Tale, and is in return the victim of the Reeve's
"quiting." Discuss the ways (structural,
verbal, thematic) in which the Reeve's
Tale responds to the Miller's Tale,
and comment on the process of "quiting" as
it manifests itself in the Fragment I of the Tales.
8. Theseus in the Knight’s Tale: principled spokesman for the chivalric life in his
efforts to bring order to a chaotic world, or crypto-fascist control freak
devoted to conquest?
9. I’ve placed several critical
essays that discuss the Tales we’ve read on Canvas (files/critical
essays). Feel free to use them to spark
your thinking about a topic, or, alternately, write about the different ways in
which a pair of them address certain tales: Muscatine vs. Fowler or Hansen or Lochrie or Aers or Patterson on
the Knight, for example, or Dinshaw vs. Hansen on the
Wife of Bath.
10. Lochrie
shows how Alisoun is reduced to a thing in the Miller’s Tale. Show how this appears with the other women in
the Knight’s, Reeve’s, or Cook’s Tales.
11.
Using passages from the First Fragment, explain why they are grouped together
as one piece. In what way do they
function as a whole?
12
.
Examine the agency of the women in the Knight’s
Tale, the Reeve’s Tale, and the Miller’s Tale. Do these tales offer a unified view of female
agency?