Abstract
The assignment described in this essay asks students to take on a fictional voice, as well as to critically analyse literary, scholarly, and student texts. Drawing from my experiences with the project, I contend that: 1) encouraging students to write imaginatively as a Chaucerian character can help them develop a more sophisticated sense of the stratagems, risks, and evasions operating within any given speaker’s “I”; 2) innovative assignments with a creative component are also beneficial because they often motivate students to work more rigorously with literary texts and scholarly sources; and 3) papers with a creative dimension readily lend themselves to equitable grading on the part of English professors, as long as we make our standards explicit to students and to ourselves.
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Fitzgibbons, M. (2007). “Cross-voiced” Assignments and the Critical “I”. In: Ashton, G., Sylvester, L. (eds) Teaching Chaucer. Teaching the New English. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230627512_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230627512_5
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