ENGLISH 4620 SECOND ESSAY ASSIGNMENT

GRADY WINTER 2010

Essays on one of the topics below should be typed and double-spaced (one-inch margins/12-point type) and four to six pages long. 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 WEDNESDAY, MARCH 15; electronic submissions are acceptable.

1. Design your own topic, of suitable specificity and sophistication, about something that interests you in The Legend of Good Women or 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 Friday, March 12.

2. [Please submit a written proposal for this topic by Friday, March 12] Write a portrait to be inserted into the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales. Imitate as closely as you can Chaucer’s techniques of description, verbal form, and style, and point of view. Your portrait may (and indeed, should) be in Modern English, but it must be in rhymed pentameter couplets, and at least twenty-four lines long. You may draw a portrait from either medieval or modern “estates,” but it should adhere to Chaucer’s manner of writing. (It might help you to think about where in the Prologue you would insert your pilgrim, and why, and what kind of tale he or she might tell. Some kinds of people will not work well for this assignment, and thinking ahead about why this is will help you to write a better portrait.)

Add to your text an essay of about three pages explaining what is particularly “Chaucerian” about your portrait.

Note: Boethius imitators are ineligible for this topic.

3. One critic has described how Thebes and its citizens 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.

4. The narrator of the Knight’s Tale is addicted to 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 particular kind of material—and if so, what does that habit tell us about his attitude or his angle towards his material?

5. 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?

6. 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?

7. 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?

8. Survey 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 about the nature of Chaucerian anticlericalism.

9. 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, if you’re feeling ambitious]).

10. Another version of #9: 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.