Literary Analysis of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Literary Analysis of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

English 200 EV: Festival, Piety, and Revelation

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Essay 2 (for Group 1): Literary Analysis of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

• Length: 2 double-spaced pages
• Due by the end of the day Fri 1/29—please note that this due date is a slight change from your syllabus.

Rationale.  As our written and spoken analyses about literary works grow more complex, those conversations are sometimes informed by published pieces of literary criticism.   In fact, almost all professors, literary critics, and advanced students of literature formulate their interpretations of literature based on the published work and critical practices of other critics.   Knowing how to do this delineates novice from more advanced students of literature.

This assignment asks you to read an essay from the back of your Norton Critical Edition of Sir Gawain and to formulate an argument about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight in conversation with that essay. You will need to summarize relevant points from the literary-critical essay.  You will also need to offer evidence for your argument, including at the level of quotation, from Sir Gawain itself.  Accomplishing this should draw you deeper into the literary work than an initial, surface-level reading would allow. Considering the options for this assignment also introduces you to some of the literary critical moves that we have been discussing in class and models ways that you can formulate more original arguments as the semester progresses.  See  “Relation to Course Objectives” near the end of this document.

Audience.  Your audience is your classmates and me.  We have already read Sir Gawain so you do not have to summarize it for us.   Turning your essay in on Blackboard makes it visible to all of us.  We may look at portions of essays in class.

Assignment trajectory.  Get used to what this assignment asks you to accomplish.  By spring break, you will have the option of expanding this posting into a longer (6-7-page) essay—or of starting over with with one of the writing prompts for Groups 2 and 3.  Those prompts are for a literary analysis about either a Canterbury Tale or Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.  Like this assignment, those prompts will also require you to formulate an argument in conversation with a literary critical article or book chapter that I suggest.  By the end of the semester, you will develop your own argument about a short story or novel on the syllabus and find relevant works of literary criticism with which to discuss it.

The task.  Choose one of the options from the following menu.  Descriptions of the options immediately follow.  We will discuss the options in class.

Option 1 (Renoir essay):  How does descriptive technique pull you into the story?

Option 2 (Borroff essay): In what ways is the narrator an interpreter?

Option 3 (Burrows essay): How does Gawain judge himself?  How does Arthur’s court judge him? 

Option 4 (Nicholls’ essay): How does Gawain’s dilemma illustrate courtly behavior?

Option 5 (Heng essay): How is the supposedly marginal or feminine actually central to the story?