ENGLISH
4260: CHAUCER WINTER
2005
GRADY FOURTH
ESSAY ASSIGNMENT
Essays (typed,
double-spaced, 5-6 pages) are due by
Also,
please note on your essay whether you would like to have it returned at the
final exam with a grade but no comments, or whether you would like to pick it
up at a later time (i.e., early next semester) with a full set of reader’s
comments.
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 Wednesday, April 28.
2. "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.
3. [back for another
run!] Write an essay about the women
we've encountered so far in the Tales
(remembering that one of them, the Wife of Bath, is a pilgrim rather than a
character in a tale). Was Chaucer really, as the 15th-century Scottish
Chaucerian Gavin
What exactly are the "gender issues"
in the Tales so far? [note: these questions are designed to stimulate your
thinking, not to take the place of the thesis you might develop, and not to
serve as the structuring principle of an essay.]
4.
Here's an alternate way of looking at gender issues in the Canterbury Tales: is it possible to
describe what Chaucer thinks of men?
5. Reread John Gower's "Tale of
Florent" from his Confessio Amantis--one
of the major sources for Chaucer's Wife
of Bath's Tale. Then write an essay
comparing the ways that Chaucer and his friend and fellow poet Gower treat the
"loathly lady" tale. (NB: Compare-and-contrast topics need a
thesis too!)
6. Reread John Gower's "Tale of Constance"
from his Confessio Amantis (available
on-line via the course syllabus)--one of the major sources for Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale. Then write an essay comparing the ways that
Chaucer and his friend and fellow poet Gower deal with the genre of the
hagiographical romance. (NB: Compare-and-contrast topics need a thesis
too!)
7.
The
8.
The Wife of