Paper Assignments English 705X Prof. N. Black

Paper #1 (due October 18)

Find an important Middle English word and look up its usage in at least one of The Canterbury Tales by using dictionaries and Chaucer concordances. Then write a three- to five-page paper incorporating what you have learned into your own reading of the tale(s). You may choose from the following list or you may find your own word to study:

entente

gentilesse

governaunce

maistrie

obeisaunce (or, obedience, obedient, obeien, obeisaunt)

pite

privitee

quiten

remedie

soverainte

The following reference books (non-circulating) will be of use to you:

Benson, Larry Dean. A Glossarial Concordance to the Riverside Chaucer. New York: Garland, 1993. [Ref: PR 1941.B46 1993]

Middle English Dictionary. Ed. H. Kurath and S. M. Kuhn. Ann Arbor, 1952--. [BC Ref: PE 679.M54]

The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford UP, 1989-. [Ref: PE1625.087 1989]

Tatlock, J. S. P. and A. G. Kennedy. Concordance to the Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer and to the Romaunt of the Rose. Washington, 1927; reprint 1963. [Ref: PR1941.T3]

Any information taken from these sources and used in your paper should be cited according to the format used in the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, ed. Joseph Gibaldi and Walter S. Achtert, 4^th or 5^th ed.

Paper #2 (first draft due November 29; final draft due December 13)

Choose a particular critical approach toward The Canterbury Tales to explore, such as one of those listed below:

new critical

Marxist

new historicist

feminist

reader response

Bakhtinian

Robertsonian

dramatic

non-dramatic

deconstructionist

psychological

Class lectures, Peter G. Beidler's edition of The Wife of Bath, pp. 89-114, M. H. Abrams’s A Glossary of Literary Terms, and the "General Bibliography" in the back of the Riverside Chaucer, pp. 771-78, will help to orient you to these approaches.

In this paper I would like you to make use of the books I have placed on the reserve shelf in the Brooklyn College Library or other books and articles you can find by using CUNYPlus and the MLA Bibliography (on-line).

Read a book or several articles that follow the critical approach you have chosen to study; take notes on your sources and decide what features of the books/articles seem effective and which do not. Then write an 8- to 10-page paper in which you argue for the effectiveness (or ineffectiveness) of the approach. You may also wish to extend the critical approach to a tale not treated by your critics and create your own reading.

As with the first paper, document all secondary sources used by following the MLA Handbook.

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