Your paper assignment: First, read through this table of contents for the "Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale" (It was invented by a modern editor, not by Chaucer). The table is meant to be used as a finding aid. You click on the link and go to the text you're looking forward. In your paper, I want you to read the table of contents closely and write on it. I want you to make up your own table of contents of any 400 successive lines of the poem of your choice (prologue or tale) and explain why you did what you did in 100-300 words.  Send it to me at [email protected]. Please send it as a goggle doc. Please do not send PDFs.
The Wife of Bath's Prologue is famous for its great length. Most critics assume it is coherent. They think the tale is also coherent. I am not so sure. One way to think about the Prologue and Tale is to chunk it out, see if you can intuit something about the narrative structure in a specific part of the Prologue or Tale. I am interested in the many times she interrupts herself. Rather than thinking of reading as ariving at a conclusion, think how to reread the text inconclusively, to speak. Literature is great because it invites you to keep (re)reading it. I suggest you let the WIfe herself guide you whenever possible. She tells us what she is going to say many times. But she does always follow up and in one case does not finish her story. Chaucer breaks up her stories.

First read the table and click on each link and then see what part of the text the line to which the link brought you. After you do that, you can decide which 100-300 lines you which to choose and ask: what is there to read closely in the table of contents? Well, in breaking down the text into parts, the editors necessarily make the table serve critical functions in addition to the mnenomic devices and finding aid: the table supplies titles; each title is a description; the titles may double as brief plot summaries of successive lines or create themes; and the table divides the text into groups of various lengths. The table of contents, in short, is not just an aid to reading a text; it is itself a text (or paratext), an introduction that is also work of exegesis, commentary, and literary criticism. You'll discover that the creation of a table of contents is difficult. The number of lines the editors divide into groups varies considerably. Sometimes the group is only ten lines. In the case, the group may be over 50 lines. Why? Because the editors are following the logic of the text. The smaller the group, the more important it is. One problem you'll face is how to divide the text into groups. If you have too few lines in each group, say just one, then the table ceases to function. And if you have too many lines, the text will not function well because you will limit so much of the text that the table is not worth using. How much text to include, how much to exclude are always difficult questions involving both critical function and critical tact. Titles come with a similar problem: how long should they be? Ideally, they should be short enough to serve as finding aids or mnenomic devices. But you need more than one or two lines that editors might comment on. (That would be something like an index with one word entries like "experience."). Shortness means the title will necessarily exclude a lot. Which lines will readers likely be trying to find? Or lines they'll be called back to because they had forgotten them? How much detail do you need in your titles? Some of the titles in the table of contents are just one word. How general can you be and still let readers know what you’re talking about? You will need to keep these problems in mind at different points as you create your titles. 


A good example is the last entry in the table of contents :

I do not think that is a good way to end the table of contents because the ending is not actually happy. After she finishes telling the tale, the Wife spends the last four lines praying and cursing abusive husbands hoping their lives will be shortened. The break between the romantic ending of the tale and the fiercely anti-idealistic curse is really important, imo to our understanding of the Wife. It begins "And," as does 1257. Line 1265 is a perfect place to stop. Yet Chaucer instead adds four more lines and so ends on a rather bitter note: the wife speaks in her own voice. She is no longer the narrator. The story is finished. The wife's final interruption or disruption may recall to the reader her own troubled marriages of which spoke in the Prologue. What could the editors have done better to note the unhappy ending, the prayer for punishment?


Well, they might have added a question here: 

But that is not a very resolution, imo, because it is potentially confusing: the tale does have a happy ending. Better to include a title for a last section, even though it is very short,:

When you create your own new and improved table of contents, you will make your own critical decisions. You are free to divide up lines differently and add more entries (like I just did) or less. 

P.S. The Wife curses one of her first three husbands the same way in line 365 "O leve sire Shrewe! Jhesu shorte thy lyfe!" It's not clear to whom she is speaking when she says "thou" because she lumps all three husbands together. She seems to be addressing one husband at some points, all of them at others. And perhaps she (Chaucer) is addressing the reader.

Here are some more thoughts on the table of contents assignment.  Select a large number of lines that you can supply at least two more titles.  Some passages, like the exchange between the Friar and the Summoner do not need subdivisions and hence no do not need new titles.  One will do. The same is true of the story about Midas.  It's a more or less self-contained fragment.   
   To do the assignment, you will need to reread the Prologue and Tale and do so very carefully.  If you are having problems following the plot, then try to understand where the problems are.  But you'll need to have basic reading comprehension in order to do close reading.  
  The existing table of contents has its own rationale.  But the table could be improved by giving the Prologue or Tale a different rationale.  
  The alternate paper topic works the same way. You have to understand the Tale well in order to see why the passages I gave you could have been cut. The basic question is this:  Why is the tale so long?  It's supposedly about a knight who escapes the death penalty for rape by learning what women want and marrying the old hag who taught him. That's it. That's the plot. But the Tale includes Stories and commentary that have nothing to do with the plot. Why?  What purposes do they serve? Reading closely means you notice something odd, like the last four lines, and then consider what they're doing in relation to the tale and the teller. Do not make up something that is not in the text so that you can ignore the problem. Just comment in the margin: Note to self: "this is weird." Or "the ladies that dance and disappear are like the elves we heard at the beginning."  Then just move on.  Eventually, some question will emerge out of your notes like the one we discussed yesterday: How did the old lady transform herself into a young lady? Don't imagine there is an answer.  Think about how it came to be a question: then you can return to moments you noted and a lightbulb will turn on.  And then maybe the question you asked may raise another question.  It's a process.  We did see it in action.  Chaucer is deeply interested in storytelling, in the way people tell stories and in the way people hear them.  Or don't.  The wife is deaf.  The characterization of a character like the wife emerges from the way they talk, what they repeat or omit or add, etc.  They don't always have a lot of psychological depth.  Why did the old woman help the knight?  Why did she demand he marry her?  We'll never know.  Chaucer isn't interested in her motives.  But he does make her realistic. 
OK. Hope this helps.

 

NOTE BENE:
Now that you have learned from your mistakes in our discussion of your first paper, and now that you have practiced writing through your DQs, I fully expect you to be able to make an argument in your essay, write grammatical sentences, use words properly, and punctuate properly. Be sure to give yourself time to revise and to proofread your paper carefully before you send it to me at [email protected]. I recommend reading your work aloud both by yourself and to someone you know. It's a good way to see what you need to revise. You can also get help at the Writing Program. See also the Plain Style: A Guide to Written English. READ THROUGH THIS WEBPAGE.
There is a treasure trove of resources on close reading here:
https://www.closereadingarchive.org/teaching