ENGLISH 4260: CHAUCER FALL 2016

SECOND ESSAY ASSIGNMENT

Essays on one of the topics below should be double-spaced (one-inch margins/12-point type) and five to six pages (±1500 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 by midnight on TUESDAY OCTOBER 18; electronic submissions only (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 Thursday, October 13.

2. 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).

3. Another version of #7: 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.

4. Yet one more version: some critics would argue (look, for example, at the remarks by Lochrie and Hansen here) that one of the things that unifies the first fragment of the Tales is the way that the tales represent women: that is, when it comes women’s roles, the division between romance and fabliau is a distinction without a difference. Comment on/argue about this claim.

5. 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 Douglas claimed, “evir (God wait) all womanis frend”? Do women's roles, and Chaucer's depiction of them, tend to vary from genre to genre, or can you construct a consistent picture of his attitude about gender issues? What exactly are the "gender issues" in the Tales so far? [note: these questions are designed to stimulate your thinking, not to take the place of the thesis you might develop, and not to serve as the structuring principles of an essay.]

6. 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?

7. Reread John Gower's "Tale of Florent" from his Confessio Amantis. Then 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!)

8. The Wife of Bath pays lot of attention to bodies, both women's and men's, in her Prologue and Tale. Why is that? Discuss the importance of the body--its various functions, the natural and unnatural changes it can undergo--as a theme in her performance.

9. [held over!] 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 specific kind of material—and if so, what does that habit tell us about his attitude or his angle towards his material?