ENGLISH 4620: CHAUCER FIRST 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 “mindset.” Essays are due on Friday, March 23; 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 Friday, March 16.

2. 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.]

3. 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?

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

5. 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.

6. What happens in the Canterbury Tales when men look at women who don’t know, at first, that they’re being looked at?

7. 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).

7. 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.

8. I’ve placed several critical essays that discuss the Tales we’ve read on Canvas (files/critical essays). Feel free to use them to spark your thinking about a topic, or, alternately, write about the different ways in which a pair of them address certain tales: Muscatine vs. Fowler or Hansen or Lochrie or Aers or Patterson on the Knight, for example, or Dinshaw vs. Hansen on the Wife of Bath.