Reed College
Reed College

Humanities 110

Introduction to the Humanities

Paper Topics | Fall 2011 | Paper 4

Due Saturday, December 3rd, 5 p.m., in your conference leader's Eliot Hall mailbox.
Suggested Length 1500-1800 words

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 primary texts to support that claim. You will want to focus on specific characters, episodes, relations, themes, or claims in the texts, rather than provide general summaries.

  1. Provide a close rhetorical analysis of Cassandra's long speech to the Chorus in Aeschylus' Agamemnon (lines 1269-1322). How would you characterize the style of the speech? In what ways and to what effects does Cassandra employ metaphors and other imagery? In what ways is her act of communication efficacious?

  2. By means of a close visual analysis, discuss the ways in which the Parthenon represents the relationship between Athens and its Others. You may especially wish to focus on either the Centauromachy (south metopes) or the Amazonomachy (west metopes).

  3. Compare the accounts of the Trojan War given by Herodotus in his Histories (1.3-1.5 and 2.113-2.120) and Thucydides in his History of the Peloponnesian War (1.9-1.12). What role does the Trojan War play in each of their histories? How does each historian invoke Homer as an authority and suggest limits to what kinds of knowledge the poet can provide? What larger claims can we make about the two historians' methodologies, interests, and goals from their treatment of the Trojan War?

  4. What notions of justice emerge from Haemon's dialogue with Creon in Sophocles' Antigone (lines 688-831)? How does Haemon's idea of justice differ from his father's? What is the more general significance of their discussion of justice for the text as a whole?

  5. What contributions and what challenges do women make to the health of the city? Discuss with reference to Thucydides' account of Pericles' Funeral Oration and to one of the following: The Eumenides, Antigone, or the Parthenon Frieze.

  6. Discuss Herodotus' views on monarchy, with specific attention to the constitutional debate and Darius' winning of the kingship (3.80-3.89), and to the discussion of Xerxes' succession and his actions preparing for the assault on Greece (7.1-7.39).

  7. How does the visual program of the Athenian Parthenon reflect the political values set forth in Pericles' Funeral Oration?

  8. Through the parable of Solon and Croesus, Herodotus instructs his reader to "look to the end" in order to understand the meaning of a life or a story. With this in mind, what is the meaning of the flashback anecdote that concludes The Histories, in which Cyrus declines the opportunity to continue expanding his empire? What might this episode tell us about Herodotus' understanding of the nature of historical inquiry?

  9. In consultation with your conference leader, write an essay on a topic of your own devising.