ENGLISH 4260: CHAUCER GRADY

FALL 2003 FIRST ESSAY ASSIGNMENT

Please submit a 5-6 page essay on one of the topics below by FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 26. Remember to support your assertions with frequent, accurate, and direct reference to the text, and be sure to cite correctly any other sources you use.

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 and a short written description of the project are required (by Monday 9/22); talking with one another is highly recommended, too.

2. [Please submit a written proposal for this topic by Monday, 9/22.] Write a portrait to be inserted into the General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales. Imitate as closely as you can Chaucer's techniques of description, verbal form and style, and point of view. Your portrait should probably be in Modern English, but it must be in rhymed pentameter couplets, and at least twenty-four lines long. You may draw your portrait from either medieval or modern "estates," but it should adhere to Chaucer's manner of writing. (It may help you to think about where in the Prologue you would insert your pilgrim, and why, and what kind of tale he or she would tell. Some kinds of people will not work well for this assignment, and thinking ahead about why this is will help you write a better portrait.)

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

3. Survey the portraits of the religious folk described in the General Prologue and, (a) knowing that later developments may make you want to change your mind, and (b) recognizing that Chaucer is working in a longstanding tradition of anticlerical satire, hazard some opinions about the poet's attitude toward the clergy of his day. Does he treat these characters as a class or group more than he does other pilgrims? Are their portraits different in kind or degree from other portraits?

4. One critic has recently 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.

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 I (General Prologue, Knight, Miller, Reeve, Cook).

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 First Fragment of the Tales.

7. In Palamon and Arcite, the Knight's Tale depicts lovers who can easily be identified as "courtly." Is the courtly ethos depicted as admirable? silly? elevating? impractical? Is it simply a screen for other kinds of relations, or is it a sincere expression of feeling? Is it all of the above? What clues in the text--provided by the narrator or the poet, or by the reactions of other characters--support your characterization of Chaucer’s treatment of fin amour? (You might find a look back at the end of The Parliament of Fowls helpful.)

8. Other possibilities: the role/character/assesment of Theseus in the KnT; the role of women/Emelye/Amazons/Emelye and Alisoun so far in the CT; issues of governance in the GP/KnT/MilP; the character of the narrator.