Content Warning: Due to the topic chosen, we will be discussing sexual assault and rape. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales have a fair amount of references or depictions of sexually violent or coercive acts – if you feel at all uncomfortable with being in the class when we discuss this, I will not penalize you for stepping out of the classroom. I will try to always alert you to upcoming discussions or tales that may fit this description – but as critics have noted, approximately half of the Canterbury Tales is about or concerning sexual assault.

Course Goals: By the end of the Course, Students will be able to:

• Express ideas clearly in writing, with proper grammar, organization, and style.
• Understand and analyze literary writing, including the understanding of literature in its interdisciplinary contexts and the conventions of literary argumentation
• Use theory and criticism to complicate and enrich their understanding of cultural materials
• Use an academic library to find scholarly sources
• Speak effectively about cultural objects, including literature.
• Read texts in Middle English, and translate them to modern, contemporary English

Grading/Work You Must Do: In a departure from traditional grading strata, I would like to try a different methodology in this course – contract-grading. Here are some Links to explanations of How Grading Contracts work.

To summarize though, Contract Grading works on a labor-basis, not arbitrary point valuations. Meaning, if you manage to meet all the listed criteria below, you will receive full credit (aka “an A”). I like this for a few reasons – it eliminates any particular biases I might hold as a grader, it rewards effort and creativity, and allows us to try new and exciting approaches we might be scared of doing in a formal classroom structure.

I will be printing out and having you all sign the Grading Contract, but I will also reproduce a summary of the expectations of the tiers below, for your reference:

Assignments: For this class you will have 3 main elements of work to do – keeping up with the reading, preparing and presenting on the reading and investigating you do, and creating and writing a unique and useful final project. There will also be a few extra work options through the semester, as fitting for your level of engagement or responsibility for the course. I will outline the broad sketch of what work you can do below.

Presentations – For this Course, you will have to do at least One presentations on one of three different topics:

• One option could be on a relevant archive or resource concerning Chaucer or The Middle Ages
• The Second option could be on your reading or understanding of a Tale 
• The Third option could be on a piece of criticism or other relevant work that you feels helps you understand Chaucer’s work

Our class will be largely structured around these presentations – allowing you the students to craft the discussion and dialogue we engage with in a meaningful manner. As such, doing a good job on the presentations and critically doing these presentations on time/within the allotted time will largely decide how a class goes. So please put a good amount of thought into the presentations, and if you are going to miss class during the week of your presentation, please let me know ahead of time.

Additional Work – For this course, if you agree to higher expectations and responsibilities in order to get a higher final grade – you will be responsible for some additional assignments. These can take a variety of forms, like the final project:

•  You could design a unit plan/set of lessons on teaching a certain concept or tale in Chaucer;
•  You could paint a portrait or write a series of poems or short story in response to one of the characters in the tale; 
• You could write a roughly three to four page commentary on a passage of at least ten lines of Chaucer, with an accompanying Middle English translation; 
• You could translate and provide your own glosses and links to relevant criticism to a larger portion of a tale (say around 100 lines)
• You could create an annotated bibliography of recent (since the 2000s) scholarship on a particular concept or tale of Chaucer’s, including at least ten items.

Or other relevant smaller pieces of creative or scholarly production! Please feel free to make these useful to you – these could be useful launching points for your larger final project, or synergistically coordinated with other coursework you are doing – but they must be wholly your own, and uniquely fit for this class. You should aim to finish these assignments approximately one to two weeks after we’ve read the relevant tale – so if you are writing on the Clerk’s Tale, I expect that you’ll hand in an assignment by February 22nd. If this morphs into a larger project that you’d like to turn in as your final project, let me know when you submit this so I can prioritise getting feedback to you.

Final Project – About midway through the semester (Mar 8 – 15) you must write a simple proposal or abstract of your final project – it need only be 250 words if an Abstract, or 2-3 pages if a proposal. If this project is a traditional essay, I expect you will obey all academic standards and utilize proper citation methods – and your proposal should follow the general conventions of an abstract. If you are deviating from this, I would like your proposal to be a clear description of what you intend to do, and why. I will then give you some feedback and direction on this proposal, and we’ll set the expectations for the final product. You may build the Final Project out from Additional Work you have done, and you may wish to collaborate and work together with your classmates. If you are collaborating with classmates, you will need to let me know in the proposal – and when the final project is submitted, you will privately confer with me whether or not your partner contributed enough labor and work for this project.

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