"Age of Chaucer" - Second Essay

EN210: Special Topics:

The Age of Chaucer

Second Essay Assignment

The first essay is due at the beginning of class on Monday, May 2. The essay should be about 6-7 pages long. In this essay, you should compare and contrast any one of the Chaucerian texts that we have read to any one of the non-Chaucerian texts that we have read. For instance, you could:

...compare and contrast the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales to Boccaccio's prologue to the Decameron or to any of the selections from Gower or Langland, in terms of their depictions of real, ideal, or satirical visions of society.
...compare and contrast one of Chaucer's chivalric romances-- the Knight's Tale, the Wife of Bath's Tale, or the Franklin's Tale-- to all or part of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or Malory's Morte Darthur, in terms of their representations of a particular theme, such as class, gender, power, authority, violence, "trouthe," philosophy, or religion.
...compare and contrast the Miller's Tale or the Pardoner's Tale to one or two of the mystery plays, in terms of the Chaucer's explicit use of or reference to the religious drama, or in terms of their uses of comedy to address such themes as sex, gender, marriage, violence, religion, political power, wealth and poverty, knowledge, or literacy.
...compare and contrast the representations of women and gender in medieval society in the Wife of Bath's Prologue and the Showings of Julian of Norwich or the Book of Margery Kempe.
...compare and contrast the Pardoner's Prologue and Tale to the representation of religious figures in general or pardons and pardoners in particular in Gower's estate satires or Langland's Piers Plowman.
...compare and contast the representations of masculinity in the Pardoner's Prologue and Tale and one of the chivalric romances or mystery plays that we read.

Whichever topic you choose, it is extremely important that you have a clear, central thesis. In this case, you will need to be very precise about the similarities as well as the differences between the texts you are analyzing. This thesis should be stately clearly and concisely at the beginning of the essay, and that everything in the essay be dedicated to demonstrating this thesis using specific evidence from the text or texts. Note that the thesis of the essay is the one, central idea that you want to convince the reader of. A good thesis is one that can be proven (that is, there is objective evidence in the texts to support it) and that needs to be proven (that is, it is not obvious or self-evident). You therefore need to avoid vagueness and state the thesis with as much specificity as possible.

Format: All submitted papers should follow the Modern Language Association (MLA) guidelines for formatting a paper. These guidelines can be found in the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 6th ed., which is available in the Reference Section of the library and in the Writing Center, but they are also summarized on pp. 148-150 of Diana Hacker’s Pocket Style Manual, with sample pages on pp. 151-154. When commenting on your essays, I will refer to Hacker on matters of format and style.

Following the MLA style, all papers should cite their sources on every occasion that they are used, and all paper should include a complete list of works cited.