ENGLISH
201: CHAUCER’S CANTERBURY TALES FIRST ESSAY ASSIGNMENT
GRADY SPRING
2015
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 “relatable.” Essays are due by SATURDAY, APRIL 25; electronic submissions are strongly preferred (fgrady@carleton.edu).
1.
Design your own topic, of suitable specificity and sophistication, about
something that interests you in the portion of the Canterbury Tales we’ve
read so far. A brief consultation with
the instructor is required; talking with one another is recommended, too, and
I’d like to receive a paragraph or email describing your topic by Wednesday, April
13.
2.
Critics have 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.
3.
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?
4. (a) The Knight’s Tale explicitly and successfully celebrates
healing power of chivalric ritual and its capacity to bring order to a world
beset by chaotic and sometimes malign forces. Doesn’t it?
or
(b)
Theseus in the Knight’s Tale: principled spokesman for the chivalric
life in his efforts to bring order to a chaotic world, or crypto-fascist
control freak devoted to conquest?
5.
Hippolyta and Emelye are Amazons, or so we’re told,
hardy participants in “the grete bataille for the nones / Bitwixen Atthenes and Amazones.” What in the world happens to them?
6.
Survey the portraits of the religious folk described in the General Prologue (Prioresse,
Monk, Friar, Clerk, Parson, Summoner, Pardoner) and,
knowing that later developments may make you want to change your mind, hazard
some opinions about the nature of Chaucerian anticlericalism.
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).
8. 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.
9.
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.