ENGLISH 4620 Fourth ESSAY ASSIGNMENT

GRADY SPRING 2013

Essays should take up one of the topics below (double-spaced/one-inch margins/12-point type) and be five to six pages (±1600 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 10; electronic submissions are strongly 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 Monday, May 6.

2. 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 conslusion?

3. Use one of the critical remarks on 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 ] as an essay prompt (but 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. 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, or other devices that help to unify Fragment VII (Shipman through Nun’s Priest).

(a) Here’s a possibility: many tales and links in the fragment seem to be concerned with masculinity and virility and male reputation.

6. “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, in the Wife of Bath’s Tale, the Clerk’s Tale, and elsewhere (Knight? Summoner? Merchant? Melibee? Nun’s Priest?). Does Chaucer seem to have a particular “take” on the giving (and receiving) of counsel?

7. “…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 not-yet-published essay on the Canterbury Tales).

8. What function do children perform in Chaucer's poetry? (and who counts as a child, exactly?)