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 Franklin's Tale resolves the problems that arise in the other tales of marriage?

            (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?