ENGLISH 4260: CHAUCER SECOND LONGER ESSAY ASSIGNMENT

GRADY SPRING 2018

Essays on one of the topics below should be double-spaced (one-inch margins/12-point type) and up to 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 “portray.” Essays are due on Friday, April 20; electronic submissions to my email are 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, April 16.

2. "By drawing narrators from the genres that define them, Chaucer makes his reassessments of those genres a dramatic process. Like the Wife of Bath berating antifeminist authors and the Squire forecasting the adventures of noble youths, the Franklin speaks a literature by which he has been configured" (Susan Crane, Gender and Romance in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales [1994], p.107). Discuss this dramatic process--that is, the effect Chaucer achieves by producing these potentially self-satirizing stories--with reference to the Knight's Tale or the Wife of Bath's Prologue or the Summoner’s Tale or the Pardoner’s Tale.

3. Use one of the critical remarks on the Clerk’s Tale [http://www.umsl.edu/~gradyf/chaucer/Petrarch.htm] or the Franklin’s Tale [http://www.umsl.edu/~gradyf/chaucer/franklincrit.htm] or the Pardoner’s Tale [http://www.umsl.edu/~gradyf/chaucer/pardonercritics.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 (or, start writing this essay now, and wait to finish it until after we’ve discussed the interruption at the end of the Monk’s Tale). Who gets to interrupt, why do they do it, and are there different kinds of interruption (e.g., authorized and unauthorized)?

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 III (Wife of Bath, Friar, Summoner).

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?). Does Chaucer seem to have a particular “take” on the giving (and receiving) of counsel?

7. Kittredge agues in "Chaucer's Discussion of Marriage" the Franklin's Tale provides a suitable conclusion and reconciliation of the issues of marriage that Chaucer writes about in the Wife of Bath's, Clerk's, Merchant's and Franklin's Tales (which Kittredge called the "marriage group"). Several topics revolving around this issue suggest themselves:

(a) Is Kittredge right to group these tales together? Is there a "marriage group" in the Tales--and what tales should it include?

(b) Do you agree with Kittredge that the Franklin's Tale resolves the problems that arise in the other tales of marriage?

(c) If we accept the Ellesmere/Riverside order of the Canterbury Tales as "Chaucerian", how would you describe the importance of the Wife of Bath's performance in the sequence of the tales we've read so far?

(d) Write an essay on any other aspect of the marriage theme in the Tales we've read so far (e.g., marriage in the non-“Marriage Group” tales of the first fragment).

8. What function do children perform in the Canterbury Tales? (and who counts as a child, exactly?)

9. How does Chaucer deal with the topic of lordship in the Canterbury Tales? Some questions to consider: what makes a good lord, or a proper exercise of lordly authority? How should one approach one’s lord—what’s the best way to deal with him? What’s the relationship between lordship and gentilesse, or between noble birth and noble deeds—and does that relationship always work out the way it characters say it ought to? When Chaucer satirizes obsequiousness, what’s his goal (or, alternately, what is the goal of the pilgrims who narrate such moments)? How does the issue of governance in the frame narrative of the pilgrimage—i.e., who’s in charge of which tale comes next--relate to instances of governance in the various tales?

10. The topic of "gentilesse," and comes up repeatedly in the Canterbury Tales --the Knight implicitly endorses it, the narrator tries to distinguish "gentle" tales from the Miller's ribaldry, the Wife of Bath's Tale sermonizes about it, and the Franklin makes it his abiding concern. What's the big deal? Write about the concept of "gentilesse" in the Tales.

11. What's the function of magic in Chaucerian romance?