ENGLISH 4620 THIRD
ESSAY ASSIGNMENT
GRADY SPRING
2013
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 “portray.” Essays are due on FRIDAY, APRIL 26; 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, April 22.
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
or the Summoner’s Tale.
3. 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).
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? Does
he think of them categorically or in terms of their typical traits or
conventional behaviors?
5. Reread John Gower's "Tale of Florent" from his Confessio Amantis.
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. 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.
The
8.
The Wife of
9.
“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?
10. 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?
(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.
11.
What happens in the Canterbury
Tales when men look at women who don’t know, at first, that they’re being
looked at?