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.