Room 272

Tolkienians: please note my addendum to the post of November 22nd.

Reminder: your final paper is due on December 5th.  The topic is open, and you may feel most equipped to write on the topic of your bibliographical project.  Rather than list a bunch of topics here, I would rather discuss the possibilities in class.  Please bring some possible topics to class, and we will discuss how we might approach them in a paper.

Donald Howard claims that The Pardoner’s Tale leads the reader to a response that is diametrically opposed to St. Augustine’s admonition that we should “hate the sin but love the sinner,” and that the conciliatory kiss at the end shows up the reader’s error and awakens Christian charity (491-92, see Works Cited). I am curious to know how you respond to this dark and frightening figure. To what extent are your responses manipulated by the text, and how so?

A reminder: response papers for the final two meetings should be a bit longer (3ish pages) and a bit more formal (thesis-driven) than usual. Topics are open for both weeks, but here are some topics to consider:

–The rash promise or ill-considered oath (Fëanor’s, for example)
–Ungoliant and Melkor
–The nature of Väinämöinen
–The Sampo and the Silmarils
–Marriage between races or species (Beren and Luthien; Thingol and Melian)
–The role of iron/metal/technology in Kalevala or The Silmarillion

Remember, I would like everyone to prepare presentations of about ten minutes on your final projects. They need not be formal, but they should be substantive.

Now . . . go and eat yourself into a stupor before you worry about any of this.

Edit (Nov. 27th): I realize that I have listed some large topics for these responses. You might try to limit the scope of your paper by analyzing a specific scene or narrative moment. Don’t try a totalizing reading of one of these texts in such a short paper. Please be prepared to discuss the ideas from your response papers in class.

My dear Chaucerians, I have finished reading your bibliographies and have enjoyed them greatly. (Really! I’m not kidding.) However, there is no way that I will get through all of your tests and still have time to prepare for class by our meeting time tomorrow. So the tests will have to wait until November 28th. I will make it up to you by trying to finish class a bit early tomorrow.

I’m up to my neck in tests and bibliographies, but most of them look pretty good thus far. I will have them for you on Tuesday.

To think about as you read The Franklin’s Tale: we have discussed the tales of the Clerk and Merchant as responses to the Wife of Bath. How does the Franklin fit into this conversation?

Here is our reading schedule for our remaining days together:

–Tuesday, November 21st: The Franklin’s Tale

–Tuesday, November 28th: The Pardoner’s Tale

–Thursday, November 30th: The Prioress’s Tale and The Tale of Sir Thopas

–Tuesday, December 5th: The Nun’s Priest’s Tale, The Parson’s Prologue (not his tale), and Chaucer’s Retraction

That’s a lot to cover, but I would suffer from terrible Chaucerian guilt for the entire holiday season if I failed to expose you to these tales, especially the Pardoner’s and Nun’s Priest’s, both of which will astonish you.  Enjoy your weekend!

We will be discussing two texts this week that are, I dare say, unlike anything that you have read before. (And, of course, they are completely unlike each other as well.) I would like everyone to bring a point for discussion about each text to class. Feel free to post your points ahead of time under comments for this post.

Response paper topics are open, but here are some things to think about concering Wolfings: can you trace any patterns or tendencies in Morris’s odd vocabulary, syntax, and verse? what does this archaized language accomplish, if anything? what about his uses of some of our favorite themes, like fate, magical talismans, god-human interaction, foresight, heroic action, etc.?

Kalevala: consider the relationships between orality and literacy (or literary ambition), between song and power, between magic and narrative, and between human and divine in this text.

Finally, here is our reading schedule for the last three weeks of the semester:

–November 21st: Kalevala, cantos 6-10; The Silmarillion, pages 13-72

–November 28th: Kalevala, cantos 31-36; The Silmarillion, pages 73-187

–December 5th: Kalevala, canto 50; The Silmarillion, pages 188-304.

You should be prepared to present some aspect of your final project to the class during one of our final two meetings. These presentations should be brief, ten minutes at the most, because our time will be short. Handouts are not required.

Surely this must be Chaucer’s most cynical tale, and its shocking conclusion is an unsettling contribution to the pilgrims’ conversation on marriage. To prepare for class discussion (and, if you like, for your response papers), think about the specific points in the prologue/tale at which the Merchant seems to be responding directly to the Wife of Bath and/or the Clerk. Try to explore the levels of irony at work here. Does the tale have any moral implications, or does the Merchant posit a world of ethical chaos? Or perhaps the tale’s moral implications derive from its context in the Tales as a whole?

Reminder: our next test is Tuesday, November 14th (when it rains it pours). We will talk about this in class, but also watch this space for our next Chaucerian test-taking tutorial.

. . . but it is a Tolkienian real estate opportunity:

BBC NEWS | UK | England | Oxfordshire | £1m wanted for Tolkien’s bungalow

Your organizational method for your bibliography depends partly on your topic. The simplest method is simply to put your entries in alphabetical order by the authors’ names. However, if you are tracking the development of a trend or an idea in the scholarship, then it would make sense to order your citations chronologically.

You should write a brief introduction in which you offer your observations and conclusions about your project. Here you can contemplate questions like: have scholarly ideas about your topic changed over time? how so? have opposed schools of thought emerged? are there contributions to the scholarship that are especially convincing or important? how so?

As I evaluate your project I will consider the following sorts of questions: does it demonstrate an understanding of the material? is there a logical selection and presentation of the sources? does the project give the sense of the larger scholarly debate? are the sources properly cited? do the annotations effectively explain the sources? is the prose clear and grammatically correct?

Let me know if you have any questions . . .