Paper Topics | Spring 2011 | Paper 3
Due Saturday, April 30th, 5 p.m., in your conference leader's Eliot Hall mailbox.
Length and specific parameters will be determined by your conference leader
Write an essay in response to one of the following prompts. Structure your essay around a strong, analytical claim, and provide specific, detailed evidence from the texts to support that claim.
Examine the role and character of self-denial in Virgil's Aeneid, the Gospel of Mark, and one or more of Paul's letters. What sorts of needs, desires, or impulses are denied in each case? Are the methods of denial the same? Are the same types of anxieties at issue in each denial?
Discuss how Romans and Roman power are represented in two or more texts from the provinces or from non-Romans (The Gospel of Mark, Paul's letters to the Romans and the Corinthians, and Philo's Embassy to Gaius). To what extent are the worlds of these texts represented as a part of the Roman world or as organized around a Roman center? To what extent do they look like the world pictured by the Res Gestae or by the Ara Pacis? In what ways might they offer a competing vision of how the world is organized?
Compare the accounts provided in Livy's The Rise of Rome and Augustus's Res Gestae regarding what made the Roman Republic great, what threatened it, and what was needed to restore it. You may wish to consider such topics as foundation, leadership, political institutions, religion, civic virtue, faction, or external enemies.
Analyze the character of Jesus in the Gospel of Mark. What defines his humanity, his divinity? For what purposes does the author draw upon, augment, or alter the characters of the patriarchs of Genesis in his presentation of Jesus? Provide specific textual evidence from both the gospel and from Genesis to illustrate your argument.
Focusing on moments of storytelling in Homer's Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, and/or Ovid's Metamorphoses, discuss the ways in which these texts foreground the importance of narration itself. How do these epic poems lead their audiences toward an apprehension of the power of storytelling? What values might be at stake in such an exercise?
Examine the way that authors and artists expand the boundaries of a given genre in order to accommodate a new sensibility or sense of the world. Possible objects of study include, but are not limited to, the Laocoon sculpture, the Ara Pacis, Vergil's Aeneid, Ovid's Metamorphoses. Be sure to spend some time defining the generic context to which the work belongs, and within which it operates.
To what extent do the notions of masculinity promoted by Livy's The Rise of Rome or by Virgil's Aeneid also structure the texts of the provinces or of non-Romans? Pick one such text for your examination (perhaps especially The Gospel of Mark, Romans, Corinthians, or Philo's Embassy to Gaius).
Compare the representations of love and/or sex between males in Paul's letter to the Romans and Virgil's Aeneid, particularly in the relationship of Nisus and Euryalus. What continuities and differences are evident?
Is the Roman Imperial body different from the Republican one? That is, does it react to pain differently? Are its boundaries different? Are its pleasures different? Is it subject to different challenges, or respond to the same challenges differently? Discuss by comparing the bodies of Livy's The Rise of Rome to those of the Laocoon sculpture and/or Ovid's Metamorphoses.
In consultation with your conference leader, write an essay on a topic of your own devising.