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Tentative Syllabus Fall 2004
English 6105:01:
Seminar in British Literature I
Instructor:
Dr. Micheal Crafton
Time:
Monday
Office:
TLC 2225
Office
phone: 770-836-6512
Office hours:
M 4-5; T,
and by appointment
Course
Subtitle:
Geoffrey
Chaucer: The Pilgrims and Their Critics
Course
Description:
The critical
reception of Chaucer is perhaps one of the longest running in all of English
literature, since Anglo-Saxon or Old English literature was generally ignored
until the seventeenth century and even then did not become much of an item
until the Romantic period. But with the fifteenth-century manuscripts of
Chaucer, the illustrations, and especially William Caxton’s early printed
editions, the critical tradition can be said to begin and now in the
twenty-first century, the Chaucer industry is stronger than it has ever been
with an expanding population of scholars and critics and recent popular culture
expressions such as Columbia Tristar’s film A
Knight’s Tale and most recently the BBC modernized production of The
Canterbury Tales.
This class will survey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and its vast and diverse
representation of different genres – tools for literary study – themes and
issues that remain central in literary studies of all types and all
ages. However, we will also focus on the major schools of critics
who have greatly influenced the way the CT has been read. Some of those
schools are the following: human drama school, New Criticism, Patristic and
Texts:
Beidler, Peter G., ed. Geoffrey
Chaucer: The Wife of
Chaucer, Geoffrey. The
Cooper, Helen.
Schoeck, Richard, and Jerome Taylor,
eds. Chaucer Criticism: The
Web Resources:
Requirements
and Grade Weights:
|
Two Short
Papers (4 pages each) Group Oral
Report (15-20 min) Individual
Oral Report (12-15) Research
Paper Colloquium (10) Research
Paper (15 pages) Active
Participation in Class |
20 % 10 % 10 % 5
% 50 % 5
% |
Course
Objectives:
1
Read, analyze, and discuss selected readings from Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.
2
These works will be analyzed in light of their various genres, historical
influences, and similar work by contemporaries.
3
We will also discuss the variety of critical theories that have employed for
interpreting Chaucer and medieval literature.
4
There will be oral reports Chaucer’s sources and analogues and on contemporary
scholarly texts.
5
We will certainly spend a good deal of time learning to read
aloud Middle English and learning what we take to be Chaucer's prosody.
6.
The knowledge gained in the course will be assessed by the
traditional means of written essays and in-class oral presentations.
CLASS
SCHEDULE:
8-23:
Introduction to class, texts, The Canterbury Tales, Middle English (ME)
and begin reading Chaucer's General Prologue (GP)
8-30:
Biographical and critical overviews and General Prologue continued:
GP,
Parson’s Prologue (ParsP) page 256 of Kolve; Cooper 1-34, Du Boulay and Howard in Kolve;
Handout by Corrine Saunders available here:
http://www.westga.edu/~mcrafton/corrine_saunders.pdf
or here
9-6:
HOLIDAY: NO CLASS
9-13:
More historical criticism and sources; GP and ParsP cont’d;
Knight’s Tale (KnT) part 1 in Kolve;
Loomis and Manley in Schoeck; Sources and analogues to The GP in Kolve.
9-20:
The Knight's Tale in Kolve; Cooper’s commentary;
Frost in Schoeck
First
Group report on Sources and Analogues
Report KT___________________________________
9-27:
The Rest of Fragment I: Miller’s Tale (MilT), Reeve’s
Tale (RvT), Cook’s (CkP) in
Kolve; Beichner in Schoeck;
Commentary in Cooper
Report MilT___________________________________
Report RvT___________________________________
10-4:
Wife of
Essay # 1 Due
Report WBP___________________________________
Report WBT___________________________________
10-11:
Overview of WB criticism in Beidler: 3-41, 89-114
Robertson
and Kittredge in Kolve
(Acceptable
authors from the list: Benson, Lumianski, Ruggiers)
Report___________________________________
10-18:
Marxist Criticism and the
(Acceptable
authors from the list: Knight (in Crafton’s Office), Patterson, Whittock)
Essay # 2 Due
Report___________________________________
Report___________________________________
10-25:
Other structures and the Nun’s Priest’s Tale (NPT): Bakhtin:
Josipovici in Kolve; Manley
in Schoeck; NPT in Kolve; Commentary in Cooper
(Acceptable
authors from the list: Lindahl, Farrall,
Hupé)
Research Paper Topic Due
Report___________________________________
Report___________________________________
11-1:
Deconstruction and the Pardoner: Beidler 221-254; Pardoner’s Prologue (PardP) and (PardT) Tale in Kolve; Commentary in Cooper
(Acceptable
authors from the list: Leicester, Grudin, Frese, Williams)
Research Paper Prospectus Due
Report___________________________________
Report___________________________________
11-8:
Psychoanalytic Criticism and the Prioress: Beidler 189-220; Prioress’s Tale (PrT); Commentary in Cooper
(Acceptable
authors from the list: Collette, Leicester, Kendrick)
Research Paper Argument Outline Due and Rough Bibliography
Due
Report___________________________________
Report___________________________________
11-15:
New Historicism and the Clerk: Beidler 115-154; Clerk’s Prologue (ClP) and Tale (ClT); Commentary
in Cooper
(Acceptable
authors from the list: Patterson, Jordon, Wallace, Olson)
Research Paper Abstract Due
Report___________________________________
Report___________________________________
11-22:
Feminism and the Clerk again: Beidler 255-289; Clerk’s Prologue and Tale;
Commentary in Cooper cont’d.
(Acceptable
authors from the list: Crane, Wasserman, Delaney)
Research Paper Rough Draft Due
Report___________________________________
Report___________________________________
11-29:
Research Paper Colloquium I
Details
on the Colloquium: Click here.
|
Trish |
Jane |
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Jesse |
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Marni |
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Sandra |
Christina |
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Jamie |
Stephanie |
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Karen |
Josh |
12-6:
Research Paper Colloquium II
|
Jane |
Trish |
|
|
Jesse |
|
Marni |
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Christina |
Sandra |
|
Stephanie |
Jamie |
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Josh |
Karen |
|
Melissa |
Crafton |
12-13
Final
Exam: Supper at Harry Bailly’s – Turn in Final Paper:
Directions to the Tabard Inn.
DETAILS
OF ASSIGNMENTS
GROUP REPORTS: The group will require at least three students to report
on the sources and analogues for a tale or prologue under consideration for
that day. These reports come early in the term as we are getting to know
the text as well as possible and learning one of the more fundamental of
critical methods, source study. Some of the sources and analogues are
available in Kolve organized by prologue and tale,
although the text does not clarify when a source is assumed to be of a tale or
a prologue or both. The group may wish to consult more sources and
analogues and two texts on reserve in the library can assist with that (i.e.
Robert P. Miller and William Frank Bryan) as well as other sources. The
difficulty here, however, is that most of these sources outside of Kolve and Miller are in foreign languages.
The group report (15-20 minutes) will want to achieve three objectives.
1. Ensure that the class understand the
sources itself (what it is, where it comes from and what it has to say).
2. Explain how the source or analogue can
be seen in Chaucer’s text (e.g. what are the similarities, character, narrative
structure, style, theme?).
3. Offer some suggestions as to how an
understanding of the source or analogue might inform, guide, or limit an interpretation
of the Chaucer text.
The
group can assign duties within the group as it wishes, but the report should
reveal that each member is doing his or her equal share of the work.
ORAL REPORTS: The report
will be a 12- to 15-minute, in-class presentation on a individual scholarly
book from a list. The reporter must sign up for a report by the
second class meeting; there should be no more than two reports on any given
day. For the presentation, the student should provide the class with an
outline of the report. This outline may be an outline of the argument of
the book or of the talk; also, the reporter may want to pass out a handout of a
passage from the book or illustration. The body of the report should be a
brief overview of the argument, the conclusion – if any, the methodology, and
how the book fits into our discussion of “schools” of Chaucer criticism and to
what extent the book’s readings or argument or method is useful, worthwhile,
admirable, or beautiful or not.
SHORT PAPERS: Theses papers should be about four pages long
(double spaced, 12 pt font, standard margins) 3.5 to 4.5 about two different
subjects. They are designed to reveal your ability to write short, tight
academic prose and reveal your ability to analyze texts.
Paper
# 1: The first paper will analyze the relationship between a Chaucer text
and a source. The point here will be similar to what is done in the oral
report except it will focus on the relationship of the source to Chaucer and
the interpretation that results from that.
Paper
# 2: This paper will analyze one of the secondary sources, one of the essays
either from Schoeck or Kolve (possibly Cooper)
explicating the argument in the essay and the critical theory and method behind
it.
TERM PAPER: The
research paper must be on a single Chaucer unit with at least one tale at the
core. That is, it can focus on one tale, or a tale and prologue, or a
tale and the General Prologue, or two tales. The essay can employ
any scholarly methodology. It could provide a reading of the tale by
elucidating something about the tale (e.g., the critical history of the tale,
the relationship of the sources of the tale, the historical environment of the
tale) or it could argue for the importance of a historical context or provide a
psychoanalytic reading or a feminist reading of one school or another.
The paper should be 12-15 pages long, using the latest MLA documentation style,
and the research should be exhaustive relative to the topic and our library's
holdings.
In the process of writing this paper, each student should select a topic by
mid-term and then work toward the paper with a little more work each week:
prospectus, rough bibliography, outline of argument, abstract, rough draft and
final draft.
Colloquium: The
penultimate stage of the research paper process will be the colloquium
presentation. Half the class will present one week and the other half the
next; the half not presenting each week will be involved in critiquing.
Each presenter will meet with the instructor to discuss the rough draft of the
paper and will provide a peer reviewer with a rough draft. The student
will also provide the class with a solid abstract of the paper. During
the presentation, the student will read the abstract to the class and will
amplify parts of the abstract by reading from the larger paper for certain
parts. This should take about 10 minutes; the reviewer then will then
provide the class a written critique of the paper – strengths and weaknesses –
of one page and will talk for five minutes. The class will then question
the student writer for five minutes and then we will move to the next
presentation. We will have to work by the clock to move through three
presentations an hour.
DAILY PARTICIPATION:
This is most critical. You are expected to attend every class, on time
and not leave early. You are also expected to have read and digested the
material assigned for that day and contribute to the class your perspectives on
this material. This is a seminar, not a lecture course.
Each day that a primary text of Chaucer is assigned you are required to
selected a short passage (approx. 10 lines) and read it to the class, discuss
its importance. Each class I will call on two reports.
On days that we discuss only secondary materials, you should be prepared to
discuss one selection or passage from one selection and hold forth to the class
on your understanding of the meaning of the passage and its interest or
relevance to the material at hand.
