Fall 2004
ENGL 311
TR 12:15-1:30
Maybank 210

Your topic description for Paper 1 is due on Tuesday, October 5. The paper itself is due Friday, October 15. The minimum requirements are: 

• it must be (at least) five pages long;
• you must follow MLA parenthetical documentation guidelines for all citations;
• the paper must include a Works Cited page.

Beyond fulfilling those basic expectations, your first paper should demonstrate to me your familiarity with the concerns of, influences on, and patterns of Middle English literature that we have discussed.  In the process of your paper, your response should be informed by a close reading of the text(s), which means that you must provide specific support  for the various elements of your argument. Your grade for the paper will be based upon the following criteria:

• The persuasiveness of your reading of the text(s), which you support throughout the paper by means of specific examples;
  
• The effectiveness of your explanation of how you see these moments in/elements of the text as demonstrating your central claim (a.k.a. thesis);
  
• The precision of your writing, which should be free of grammar and spelling errors (including sentence fragments, comma splices, and punctuation mistakes).

For your paper topic, feel free to pursue your own interests, investigating ideas and questions sparked for you by your reading and our discussion.  Your paper should focus on one or more of the following texts: the various lyrics we covered at the beginning of the semester; Layamon’s Brut,Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and/or Sir Orfeo.  In case you need some direction, however, following are a few topic suggestions:

• Write a paper in which you compare/contrast Layamon’s section on the Battle at Mt. St. Michel to the depiction of that event in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s History of the Kings of Britain. Bearing in mind the different languages in which they were writing, and the accompanying different audiences to which they were presumably addressing their material, talk about the different effects of, or the different possible concerns, intentions, interests, etc., of which you see evidence, in these two versions of Arthur’s fight against the giant of Brittany.
  
• Select two or more of the lyrics which include representations of springtime (the French-influenced reverdie) and analyze the implications of the differences and similarities you spot.
  
• Write about the values suggested by the parodic lyrics “Sir John Doth Play” and “Jolly Jankyn,” bearing in mind the likely audience (see the editorial introduction to “Jack, the Nimble Holy-Water Clerk” on page 664 regarding critical assessments of the authors and audiences of these lyrics).
  
• Write a paper about the religious lyrics to the Virgin Mary “Nou Skrinketh Rose” (page 639) and “Edi Beo Thu, Heuene Quene” (page 636). Compare imagery, the qualities of Mary on which the poems focus, the tone, the use of courtly love ideals, the style, and so on.

• Layamon’s Brut presents for us the first (existing) written representation of Arthur and his reign in the English language.  Sir Gawain and the Green Knight  presents the tail end of the tradition of medieval Arthurian literature.  What sorts of changes seem to have taken place within the tradition during the nearly 300 years between these two texts?  I am of course asking you to make conclusions based solely on two representative texts, but nevertheless there is something to be learned from the differences so readily apparent between Brut  and Sir Gawain.  You may want to focus on representations of Arthur and the Round Table, or on questions of style, or on the influences of the French tradition which can be seen in Sir Gawain but are clearly avoided by Layamon.
  
• Similarly, you can discuss the ways in which the different apparent generic affiliations of Brut (pseudo-chronicle with an epic sensibility but exhibiting romance influences) and Sir Gawain  (firmly placed in the French-influenced romance tradition) are demonstrated by the two texts.
  
• Look at representations of the marvelous in Layamon, Sir Gawain, and/or some of the lyrics.  What does its presence seem to signify? What aesthetic and/or thematic purpose can you discover for it?
  
• What qualities constitute a “good knight” in Layamon? In Sir Gawain?  What challenges highlight which qualities? And of what use or significance are these qualities to the larger society?
  
• Investigate the representations of gender which we find in these texts (and don’t mistakenly assume that the absence or near-absence of women in a given text indicates a lack of interest in gender norms).  You might look at what the representations of Mary in the lyrics suggest to us about at least one construction of femininity, or you might consider the ways in which Gawain’s masculinity is challenged in Sir Gawain (and what conception of normative masculinity is assumed by the text), or you might contrast Ygerne in Brut  to Bertilak’s wife or Morgan in Sir Gawain. Wherever you look, it is important to bear in mind the (at least tangentially) didactic nature of most medieval literature: what are these texts suggesting to their audiences about what women and men are and should be like?
  
• Romance as a genre tended to strive to maintain and glorify the medieval culture’s separation of society into the three estates; in the process it supported the qualities ideologically imposed on the three strata of society, and is especially interested with naturalizing the ideals associated with the aristocracy.  Romance was generally written by, for, and about the nobility.  What image of themselves do they seem to be wanting to promote, as writers and patrons, and to hear, as audience members?
  
• Analyze the underlying and ever-present Christian elements of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.  How do they work with the ideals of courtly love that are also present in the poem? How are they contradicted by elements in the poem? How do they (or are they perhaps intended to) influence our perception of Gawain as an ideal or near-ideal knight?
  
• “In contrast to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Sir Orfeo is built on a Celtic, rather than a Christian, foundation.” Would you agree with this statement? Why or why not?
  
• Sir Orfeo obviously borrows its story from a well-known classical legend. How is it transformed from a legend to a romance? What qualities of Sir Orfeo distinguish it, marking it generically as a medieval romance?
  
• What is the role of music within Sir Orfeo?
  
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Annotated bibliography due

Topic description for Paper 2 due

Your final paper, which should be at least six pages long, is due Tuesday, December 7, at 4:00 in my office. It will count for 20% of your grade. (The annotated bibliography is worth 5%.)

In this last paper, I’d like to see you working with at least one of the Middle English texts we’ve discussed this semester AND with relevant criticism.  The primary text(s) and the critical works are your choice, and of course you can choose the topic, which will likely be guided by the particular work(s) of literature and criticism with which you decide to work. This paper should, ideally, be a discussion of the text from your own particular critical perspective, with the ideas of other critics brought in to clarify, support, or modify your own stance. 

Your paper will include at least 5 outside sources, 3 of which must be critical articles. All of these will likely have been included in your annotated bibliography (itself due, along with a one-page topic description for Paper 2, on November 9).

You may, if you wish, work with a particular genre (say, romance or history or religious writing or drama) or period (various products of the late fourteenth century, for instance) rather than a single text. It’s up to you.  Do entertain the numerous options open to you by spending some time trying to recall the various questions that have been raised for you by the readings and discussions (and gaps therein) during the semester.

Do not write about the same text on which you wrote your first paper.  If that paper was on Layamon, for instance, avoid that. Even if you’d like to write about medieval historiography as a genre, you simply can’t center your final paper on Layamon.  If you wrote about Sir Launfal and are interested in working with romance, then you’ll have to shift your focus to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or Sir Orfeo, for example. 

Regarding the critical sources, of course use the online MLA database available through the library’s webpage. Various medieval sites on the web also offer databases of critical works (see my website at www.cofc.edu/~seamanm for a page of links to relevant sites).  You should start with:

The Voice of the Shuttle’s Medieval page:  //vos.ucsb.edu/shuttle/eng-med.html

You’ll be amazed at what you can find there. Should that not suffice, try the following:

The Labyrinth home page: //www.georgetown.edu/labyrinth/labyrinth-home.html

It’s generally less useful for secondary sources, but it might lead you somewhere productive.

You can also feel free to stop in to chat with me about possible secondary sources for your particular topic.

In the paper itself, I’ll be most interested in seeing that your own reading of the text(s) is sound, and that you use the critics’ words and ideas to support or clarify your own ideas. This should not be a research paper wherein your goal is to show me that you’ve read and considered a large number of medievalists’ ideas.  Rather, your interpretation of the primary text is center stage; the critics’ words and ideas are brought onstage only in supporting roles. Needless to say, this paper needs a complete and correct Works Cited page. The precision with which you document your sources will influence your grade for the paper.