The Monk’s tales, and Chaucer’s—some critical perspectives

I have argued elsewhere that The Monk's Tale is an example of the kind of story collection that Chaucer is precisely not

writing in the CT at large: that the generic variety of those tales allows for his telling what he intends as the best romance

or fabliau or miracle of the virgin, and even, in The Monk's Tale, the best collection of stories of a single genre, as most

story collections were.

Helen Cooper, "Responding to the Monk," SAC 22 (2000): 431.

The Monk's tales…are a negative or inverse image of Chaucer's, a disturbing and crowded miniaturization of the tales of

which they form a part.

Jahan Ramazani, “Chaucer’s Monk: The Poetics of Abbreviation, Aggression, and Tragedy,” ChR 27 (1993): 260-276

As a series of tales, it already mirrors the larger poem; but more important, it is the tales' postmodern refusal of a thematic

unity, as I have argued, that parallels them to the other pilgrims' Tales on the road to Canterbury.

Richard Neuse, "They Had Their World as in Their Time: The Monk's 'Little Narratives'," SAC 22 (2000): 423

Rather than thinking of The Canterbury Tales as a judgment on the Monk's collection, then, I prefer to think of The Monk's

Tale as a warning to the reader: "Be war"; treat all of Chaucer's poetry with due caution. Chaucer may not be as cute as we

think; or, more precisely, cuteness may be scarier than we think, and no less enjoyable for that. If nothing else, the CT and

the MkT have this much in common: both are "works"--insentient artifacts whose deadness we enjoy. But I think they also

share a desire to reflect on the ethical complications of putting new signifiers in the world.

L.O. Aranye Fradenburg, Sacrifice Your Love: Psychoanalysis, Historicism, Chaucer (Minneapolis, 2003): 129