Chaucer Essay

Canterbury Tales Literary Criticism Essay

The purpose of this project is twofold: to practice writing literary criticism and to practice integrating scholarly articles into your writing on literature.

Here’s an overview of the project:

1. Choose either The Miller’s Tale or the Wife of Bath’s Prologue or Tale.
2. Search JSTOR or Gale INFOTRAC to research articles on
1. your chosen school of literary criticism, or
2. criticism aimed specifically at your chosen tale or prologue.
3. Save PDFs of a number of articles that speak to your interests and are comprehendible.
4. Scan through them and settle on one or two in which you are most interested.
5. Print and annotate them to help you understand their ideas and zero in on important passages.
6. Write an original 3 page literary analysis of your chosen tale or prologue that makes use of at least one critical source.
1. Apply an idea from a school of literary criticism to your chosen tale or prologue, or
2. Use criticism about your tale or prologue to enhance your own ideas.

At the heart of this essay are your own ideas about the literature! Do not simply restate what another critic has already said. Instead, add to the ongoing conversation about Chaucer in an original way. Think of criticism as an argument in defense of your own interpretation.

Here are some ways to use critical sources to enhance your writing:

1. Apply their philosophical ideas to your chosen text
2. Extend their ideas about the text
3. Argue against them
4. See their ideas in the light of new evidence
5. Use their ideas to support your own original analysis
6. Bring two or more different critical sources together with meaningful, original synthesis

Some suggestions for integrating critical sources:

1. Begin and end paragraphs and sections with your own ideas, not the critics’.
2. Do not quote more than four lines of text from your sources at a time. This is usually a clear indication that you are making too much of someone else’s thoughts.
3. Don’t treat your sources as if they are the authorities. (The Wife of Bath would hate that!) You are the authority! They are tools!

Integrating quotations:

The general format looks like this: As Dostoyevsky states, “Life is hell” (Dostoyevsky 45).

1. Introduce the writer.
2. Comma before the passage or paraphrase.
3. Capital letter if the passage is a complete sentence.
4. Quotation marks directly after the passage.
5. Parenthetical citation with author’s name and page number.
6. Period outside the parenthetical citation.

Some other guidelines for writing literary analysis:

1. Use the introduction to provide a brief overview of the text in terms of the critical school you are using or with a focus on the ideas that for which you will be arguing.
2. Include a thesis statement that offers a specific and original interpretation of the text.
3. Begin paragraphs with the relatively abstract ideas that they will be about.
4. Do not include too many examples or too many quotations at the expense of analysis.
1. Think MEAL -- Main idea, Examples, Analysis, Link -- where Analysis takes up the majority of the paragraph.
2. Movement between E and A is totally fine and suitable for in-depth criticism.
5. Make sure that the main ideas of each paragraph build on one another. If each paragraph a MEAL, then I want to be able to get the gist of your argument by reading the beginnings and ends of each paragraph -- MMMMM.
6. Conclude with an interesting discussion of the ideas you’ve addressed. Use your conclusion not to simply summarize but also to elaborate on the significance of your ideas.