Chaucer Response Papers

ENG 346 Spring 2008

1. Chaucer’s use of source material

• How did Chaucer make use of his sources? How do his changes affect interpretation of the story? How did he adapt material to fit his own interpretive goals? If Chaucer was retelling popular or well-known stories, how would his audience’s response be different from our’s? Should it bother us that Chaucer is simply taking someone else’s story, even if he changes some things?
• Discuss Chaucer’s use of classical mythology or pagan source materials. How would a Christian medieval author and a Christian medieval audience interpret these pagan myths? What do they add to Chaucer’s narrative?

• What is estates satire and how does Chaucer use it? How does the character of Chaucer’s Narrator (Geoffrey the pilgrim) participate in the satire of the General Prologue (GP)? He seems to praise everyone for everything. What is the effect of Chaucer’s characterization of certain pilgrims in the GP?
• One target of Chaucer’s critique is the clergy. How should we understand his critique in light of the Christianity of the 14th century?
• Chaucer’s satire is also often tied to his use of humor. Choose an example of Chaucerian humor and discuss how the humor works and what effect it has on the larger interpretive frameworks of the tales.

• What is textual authority and how does it function complexly in the Canterbury Tales (CT)?
• Chaucer often sets personal experience against textual authority. The Wife of Bath’s Prologue is the most famous case of this dialectic and the clearest example of how Chaucer deconstructs the binary he sets up. She claims that she has the personal experience of marriage that gives her authority over the clerks who only write about marriage but then she uses examples and arguments from the textual tradition. Discuss how Chaucer uses these two types of authority (experience/ book learning) and to what ends.
• Chaucer’s own personal experience seems often to be through books. He often plays with characters/narrator who claim to have no actual experience of love but who have lots of knowledge of it. This is especially clear in the dream visions. Discuss the relationship Chaucer creates between textual authority and narratorial authority.
• Discuss any experience you find in the tales that seems unmediated by textuality. Is this merely a desire on the part of narrators or characters or readers? What is it’s function?
• Discuss the role of religious belief in the creation of textual authority. Note that faith is something of which by definition there can be no personal experience. How do the narrator and/or the characters negotiate conflicting notions of religious faith in the tales? What are the consequences for the readers of these negotiations?

• How does language probelmatize narrative? Choose one of the CT and discuss how issues of language (style, rhyme, vocabulary, etc.) contribute to how Chaucer wants us to read his tales.
• Any good deconstructionist will tell you that the binaries our culture sets up are not neutrally opposite, one side of the binary is always privileged. Discuss Chaucer’s deconstruction of one or more of the following binaries. Discuss which side of the binary is privileged in which situation or from which perspective.
• Words/deeds
• Ernest/game
• Body/spirit
• Text/gloss
• Authority/experience
• Discuss the narrative devices Chaucer uses to control interpretation. Look at an example of when he is apologizing or “covering his butt” or trying to release a pilgrim from responsibility for his or her tale or retracting his words or giving responsibility to the reader to make meaning. How well does he control reader interpretation? Is that really his intention?

• Generic expectations are obviously complex in the CT and in the rest of Chaucer’s canon as well. Discuss Chaucer’s use of the dream vision. How popular was this genre in the 14th century? What were the common expectations for a dream vision? What does this format allow Chaucer to do?
• Discuss Chaucer’s use of the frame to move between the various genres of the individual tales in the CT. Describe the layering effect of this type of narration. How does it complicate interpretation in specific cases?
• How have genre studies contributed to an understanding of the CT? Why should we know the generic expectations for different types of narration? How does this knowledge or lack thereof effect our reading of the tales?

• Chaucer has been considered a protofeminist and patriarchal misogynist. Is he either? Is he both? Is this the wrong question to ask?
• Look at how gender issues inform the CT. What can we say about Chaucer’s treatment of gender issues?
• Chaucer has also been praised for drawing characters from a wide range of classes and professions. What classes do his characters inhabit? How does Chaucer talk about class issues? Consider the social mobility of late 14th century English society which Paul Strohm plots on two axis—the hierarchical bonds of a deteriorating feudalism and the growing lateral ties of those sharing class and social status. Define these terms to get a clearer picture of Chaucer’s understanding of class.
• What was Chaucer’s class status? What is involved in describing his social identity—what does one have to take into account?

• How does the theme of “common profit” (or the common good) work in the Parliament of Fowls? Is what’s good for the nobles good for the whole of society? How good for society are the noble notions of courtly love? This theme ties the dream to the frame—only by working for the comon good can we reach heaven according to Affricanus and the birds strive for a common goal. How does this theme tie into Chaucer’s reading/writing activities—esp. his writing of this dream?
• Can we detect a theme of “common profit” in the CT as well? What are the common goals of the pilgrimage? What are their common values, beliefs, assumptions about narrative? What are the rules that they’ve all agreed to? How do these common features become problematized by Chaucer?
• Do Chaucer’s Retractions further complicate any notion of “common profit” in his canon or do they make it clearer?
• Consider Chaucer’s larger identity as a writer/auctor/authority. Compare the end of Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls:

"And with the shoutyng, whan the song was do
That Foules maden at here flyght awey,
I wok, and othere bokes tok me to,
To reede upon, and yit I rede alwey.
I hope, ywis, to rede so som day
That I shal mete som thyng for to fare
The bet, and thus to rede I nyl nat spare."

With his retractions at the end of the Canterbury Tales :

"Now preye I to hem alle that herkne this litel tretys or rede, that if ther be any thyng in it that liketh hem that therof they thanken oure Lord Jhesu Crist, of whom procedeth al wit and al goodnesse. And if ther be any thyng that displese hem, I preye hem also that they arrette it to the defaute of myn unkonnynge, and nat to my wyl, that wolde ful fayn have seyd bettre if I hadde had konnynge. For oure book seith, ‘Al that is writen is writen for oure doctrine,’ and that is myn entente…”

What do these two passages reveal about Chaucer’s career as a writer or his thoughts on his identity as a writer?

8. Passage explication

• Choose a passage from one of the Canterbury Tales or the other poems and explicate its significance in excruciating detail. You must have a thesis and support for your reading of the passage. Remember that passage explication needs to make an argument for how the passage operates not just in terms of plot, but also of character, theme, and connections with larger interpretive themes and issues.