ENGLISH 201: CHAUCER’S CANTERBURY TALES SECOND ESSAY
ASSIGNMENT
GRADY SPRING
2015
Essays
should take up one of the topics below (double-spaced/one-inch margins/12-point
type) and be five to six pages (±1600 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 THURSDAY, MAY 21 (10 PM); electronic submissions are strongly
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, May 18.
2. Still eligible from the previous set of
prompts: #s 3, 6, & 9.
3. "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 either the Knight's
Tale or the Wife of Bath's Prologue
or the Summoner’s Tale.
4.
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]
as an essay prompt (but let me know in advance which one you’ve chosen).
5.
Using the ideas you sketched out in class on 5/13, write an essay that
discusses the complexities involved in interpreting the end of the Clerk’s
Tale.
6.
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)?
7. “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?
Merchant?). Does Chaucer seem to have a
particular “take” on the giving (and receiving) of counsel? (Or, start writing this essay now,
and wait to finish it until after we’ve discussed the Nun’s Priest’s Tale in
two weeks.)
8.
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? (N.B.
Kittredge’s full essay is available on Moodle, in addition to the excerpt
assigned for 5/18)
(b) Do you agree with Kittredge that
the
(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.
9.
What happens in the Canterbury
Tales when men look at women who don’t know, at first, that they’re being
looked at?