...Despite the fact that sir gawain and the green knight is a story about knighthood, it does not celebrate nights in the same ways other stories do. Gawain may be a knight other the round table who embodies knightly virtue, but eh ultimately fais to be an ideal knight because of the conflicting messages of the chivalry code and christrian doctrine. The question then becomes, why did the Gawain poet choose to portray gawain as a failed knight, instead of an idea one? To understand the situation better, it is best to outline the chilvalric code: A knight must always serve the king in valor, live for honor and glory, remain faithful to god, refrain from offending people, obey those above him, speak the truth. These are the major components that...
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...Knights of the middle ages were held to a code of chivalry. Also, a knight held a prestigious position. A knight had to show bravery, loyalty, generosity, courtesy and devotion to the liege. Knights believed deeply in the code of chivalry. They had to show mercy to those they defeated. The knights in “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” and “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” showed good and bad qualities when considering the codes of chivalry. The knight in “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” showed loyalty to King Arthur. He showed his loyalty by taking the place of King Arthur’s challenge to the Green Knight: Gawain by Guenevere Toward the king doth now incline: “I beseech, before all here, That...
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...Testing the Actions of a Knight The story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was translated by Burton Raffel during the Middle Ages. Actions show what your true character really is. The actions of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight addresses the code of conduct for knights during that time period. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, translated by Burton Raffel, addresses the code of conduct for knights in the Middle Ages through the actions of Sir Gawain in order to reveal his true character. The Green Knight walks in and challenges the men’s knightly-hood by submitting to a blow from the ax if he can return the blow a year and a day in the future. Every knight just starts looking around roaming the room with their eyes. His challenge sparks...
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...Chivalry is a religious, moral, and social code that knights followed; the qualities that an ideal knight was expected to have, such as honor, courage, justice, courtesy, and respectfulness. Temptation is an action/thing that attracts someone to do something usually wrong/unwise. These two collide in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight to show just how far the high and mighty Gawain could fall. Gawain is the epitome of knighthood; humble, respectful, handsome, and courteous. He is, in a sense, perfect, but of course nothing is perfect, and Gawain is no exception. “First he was deemed flawless in his five senses;/ and secondly his five fingers were never at fault;/ and thirdly his faith was founded in the five wounds/ Christ received on the...
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...3rd Hour 12 October 2016 Sir Gawain Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a story that tests King Arthur and his knights. Sir Gawain takes the challenge away from King Arthur because he is closely related to the king. King Arthur and all his knights were a little shaken up when Sir Gawain volunteered to take part in the game. I believe Sir Gawain volunteered for the game because he is more concerned about his honor than about his life. Sir Gawain makes a bold act when he decides to take King Arthur's place in the game that the Green Knight offered. King Arthur’s “court assays the claim / And in counsel all united / To give Gawain the game / And release the king outright”(“from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” lns. 135-138). Sir Gawain believes that because Arthur is the king, he should stay true to him and take is place in the game. He also believes he should take Arthur’s place because King Arthur is his uncle, and because Sir Gawain is one of the worst...
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...In an excerpt of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (Lines 289-319), the author’s rhetorical purpose is to be entertained. The author’s intentions are for you to be entertained by the suspense of whether the Green Knight would cut Sir Gawain’s neck or if he would spare his life. This is portrayed by the different patterns and word choices that the author uses during this situation in the poem. One rhetorical pattern in the poem that I noticed was the use of alliteration. An example of this in the poem is, “And that blinding bit bites in at the knight’s bare neck” (Line 250). The author strategically uses this alliteration instead of just simply saying that the sword hit his neck. Another rhetorical pattern that the author effectively used...
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...The rhetorical purpose of the first 30 lines of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is that the poem conveys a purpose. The poem uses a boat load of alliteration in almost most of the first 30 lines. “So monstrous a mount, so mighty a man in the saddle”, is one fantastic alliteration that is used. The 18th line has the letter “M” repeated 4 times in a sentence, which makes it as alliteration. Another alliteration used in the poem is in line 12. “Now a thread of hair, now another thread of gold”. In the poem, in lines 20-24 is something called bob and wheel. Bob and wheel is basically just rhymes. “His eyes, like lightning, flashed, And it seemed to many a man, That any man who clashed With him would not long stand.” Flashed...
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...Poet is the anonymous author for the poem “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight”. Thomas Malory is the famous author for “Le Morte d’Arthur”. “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” is about someone taking on the challenge to take a blow the Green Knight. “Le Morte d’Arthur” is mainly about Gawain fighting Lancelot because he killed Gawain’s two brothers. First, how Gawain shows that he is a courageous is when he agrees to battle the Green Knight, so King Arthur doesn’t have to. He thinks that if anything happened to him he would be the least missed, which is kind of sad that he thinks no one would miss him. Because he thinks he will be the least missed he agrees to take on the Green Knight “the Green Knight askes Gawain is to identify himself, and the two...
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...Truth Behind the Knight: The Presence of Archetypes in Sir Gawain & the Green Knight In the medieval story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, we are introduced to a young man, who, like many of young men, is trying to discover himself and travel through his rite of passage. He is trying to figure out who he is in life, and while in his journey, passes through many phases that mold him into one of the great Knights of the Round Table that old King Arthur wanted to serve with him. These phases affect everyone at some point in their lives. Whether it causes someone to take an iconoclastic stand against a certain more or folkway or if it enables a person to give serious thought to what life could mean, archetypes enable any protagonist in any story to take a journey to find the treasure of their true self. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Gawain was willing to take on the heroic quest and say yes to himself and, in doing so, became more fully alive and more effective to the knightly community and, inadvertently, the literary world. The purpose of the heroic quest is to find the gift retrieved from the journey and give the gift to help transform the kingdom, and in the process, the hero himself. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, three archetypes are present that displays the qualities of a heroic quest that leads Gawain to become a true knight in shining armor. The Innocent Hero Archetype, the Seeker Archetype, and the Lover Archetype forms the mold that Sir Gawain conforms to...
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...Lost and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight there are two characters who stick out with that fall in this category. Eve and Sir Gawain in their respective works of literature fall to deception. They both let their emotions be altered which ultimately led to their downfall. Sir Gawain had a vision in mind but it was hindered by how his pride ended up being a form of deception. Eve was giving specific orders not to eat the fruit from the forbidden tree and would have abided by this until the devil came and deceived her by preying on her gullibility. Paradise Lost gives us a unique perspective of Eve. In the story Eve was created after Adam in order to complement and help him rule over the land that God gave them. God gave them freedom to have anything they want in the land but told them specifically that there was one tree in particular that they could not eat from. Eve was much different from Adam because she was a female and her entire mannerisms were different. God specifically made Eve to be different. She was more in tuned with her feelings. She was emotional and was beautiful in her physical features. Eve fed off of that and embraced the fact that she was beautiful, which later had a role in her downfall. Compared to Adam she is a bit inferior. Eve is presented as inferior because Adam is the one that is usually trusted with making decisions. She doesn’t have a problem with him making the harder decisions that require critical thinking and analysis. The devil...
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...Dr. Parker English 102: Sect. D09 Fall 2014 Paper 1: On Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and The Great Gatsby Format: Follow Easy Writer guidelines and those specified in “Using Quotations Effectively,” “The Thesis Statement,” “Mechanics” and “Integrating Sources” (under “Writing Tips” on Blackboard) Page Length: 4-6 pages (1000-1500 words) Due Dates: Preliminary draft uploaded to Blackboard––Friday, 9/19 (under Course Content/Formal Papers and Oral Presentations) Your draft should include at least the thesis paragraph and five passages that you plan to draw upon in the paper. Rough draft conferences––9/29-10/1 Prepare to read your draft to me during our meeting. Rough draft for peer review––Monday, 9/29 Bring hard copy to class for your peer editor to read. Final draft uploaded to Blackboard––Friday, 10/3 Leave your rough draft with peer editor’s comments at my office. You may choose either the creative or analytical essay option. If you do a creative paper now, for next paper, you will do an analytical paper. Creative Options For all creative treatments, please affix to your paper a one-page analysis of what your aims were in choosing this approach, what strategies your employed to carry out your aims, and how successful you feel you were in achieving your aims. You should draw on the texts themselves. If appropriate, you can incorporate passages from the texts into you own prose. Your...
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...Critical Reading 1. Preview. Look “around” the text before you start reading. ... 2. Annotate. Annotating puts you actively and immediately in a "dialogue” with an author and the issues and ideas you encounter in a written text. ... 3. Outline, Summarize, and Analyze. ... 4. Look for repetitions and patterns. ... 5. Contextualize. ... 6. Compare and Contrast. When you write about literature . . . Some Tips for Academic Writers Sentence Style 1. Use simple sentences as rubrics (pointers). 2. Use compound sentences to suggest balance and to present pairs of ideas of equal value. 3. Use complex sentence to emphasize the most important ideas and to subordinate less important ideas. 4. Avoid "empty" sentence frames that say little or restate the obvious. 5. Use present tense when referencing details in a literary work except for passages written in the past tense. 6. Incorporate short, key quoted phrases into analytical sentences. 7. Avoid the use of such words and phrases as "you" and "the reader" that often lead to wordiness. 8. Avoid the phrase, "In conclusion," when opening the concluding paragraph. 9. Avoid gratuitous complements and superlatives. Paragraph Development 1. Use Pattern 1 paragraph frames for most paragraphs in the body of academic essays. 2. Begin body paragraphs with claims as topic sentences that repeat key concepts from the thesis sentence. 3. Always introduce the speaker, context, and/or significance of block quotations. 4. Always...
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...While watching movies does one ever wonder why so many events the protagonist experiences reflect such dramatic similarities ? Probably not. Likewise, in literature, the books make one wonder about the consistencies in the plot. This redundancy can be most readily understood if one were to view these works through the lens of archetypal analysis, or through patterns within the “Monomyth,” as revealed in The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. In Beowulf, for instance, Beowulf is the hero; meanwhile Grendel is his nemesis until his death. In Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Gawain is also the hero, but he is not the trickster in the story. Therefore, similarities both of these works do have, but contradictions also exist. . Certain similarities and differences, however, stem not from age-old Monomythic patterns, but rather from differences in worldviews, varied paradigms held by cultures separated by roughly 350 years of development. Thus, some values...
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...textual analysis and close reading. I had several long conversations about these papers with Prof. Wallace Mann, the R. Talbot Sondheim Professor of African Studies at Swarthmore. My second excursion into less-traveled territory was a paper I wrote for Introduction to Hebrew Scriptures. I chose to do an exegesis of Isaiah 65:17-25. I worked from the original Hebrew text since I had taken a course in biblical Hebrew (Religion 93) and have a moderate level of reading comprehension of the language. I had a marvelous time digging so deeply into each word, and sometimes even individual letters, as is required in an exegesis of a Hebrew passage. My two major projects this year-my thesis and my senior project-are related by the theme of war literature, and my work on one project gives me new ideas for the other. I feel fortunate that this has worked out, and at the University of Colorado-Boulder I want to continue studying twentieth-century literature. However, I am also ready to start widening my base, casting out in some new directions. I have found over and over that if I have a long-standing gut-level enjoyment of some kind of literature I almost invariably have a wonderful time and do a particularly good job taking an academic approach to that literature. Old English literature is in this category for me. I have never done academic work in Old English literature, but for years I have treasured a cassette tape on which are recorded in Old English the stories of Sir Gawain and the...
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...Descriptive, Description, Dialog, Division, Exploratory, Expository, Informative, Interview, Inquiry, Journalistic, Narration, Observation. Personal Narrative, Place, Profile, Process, Proposal English Literature and Literary Analysis - Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, A & P, Antigone, Apocalypse Now, Araby, The Awakening, Barn Burning, Beowulf, Beloved, Bible, Birthmark, Blade Runner, The Bluest Eye, Candide, Canterbury Tales, Catcher in the Rye, Cathedral, Chrysanthemums, A Clockwork Orange, The Color Purple, Comparing Literary Works, Crime and Punishment, Death of a Salesman, Death in Venice, Desiree's Baby, A Doll's House, Dr. Faustus, Epic of Gilgamesh, Everyday Use, A Farewell to Arms, Frankenstein, The Grapes of Wrath, Great Gatsby, Great Expectations, Glass Menagerie, Gulliver's Travels, The Handmaid's Tale, Heart of Darkness, The Iliad, Invisible Man, Jane Eyre, The Joy Luck Club, The Lottery, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, Metamorphosis, My Antonia, My Papa's Waltz, Neuromancer, The Odyssey, Oedipus Rex, On the Road, Oresteia, Paradise Lost, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Pride and Prejudice, A Raisin in the Sun, A Rose for Emily, The Scarlet Letter, Siddhartha, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Slaughterhouse-Five, Song of Solomon, The...
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