Humanities 110

Paper Topics | Spring 2012 | Paper 3

Due Saturday, April 21st, 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 primary texts to support that claim.

1. Identify one or more examples of intertextual allusions in the Aeneid to other texts you have read in this course. How do these references affect the meaning of Virgils text?

2. Philo of Alexandria asserts that the word Israel, translated into Greek, means the seeing nation. In an analysis of The Embassy to Gaius, trace some of the ways in which vision (or witnessing) functions as a mode of resistance to Roman authority.

3. Analyze the figure of Camilla in Virgils Aeneid in relation to at least one of the other female characters, perhaps especially to Dido and Amata. What do these characters suggest about the issue of anger (furor), which dominates the end of the epic?

4. Compare the concept of faith as it is expressed (or implied) in the Gospel of Mark and in either Romans or 1 Corinthians.

5. By a close reading of at least one instance in each work, compare and contrast depictions of sexual violence by Ovid in his Metamorphoses and by Livy in The Rise of Rome. What might such depictions say about the status of women, the body politic, or the perception of authority?

6. Compare Virgils account of Laocons death (Aeneid, Book II, lines 56 ff.) to the visual program of the Laocon sculpture. What does each work emphasize in the story, and how does it achieve that emphasis? Pay particular attention to the salient formal elements of both the epic and the sculpture.

7. Focusing on the account of Apollo and Daphne and on one other episode in The Metamorphoses, discuss the specific ways that Ovid presents and problematizes the relationship between desire and language (or even desire and the creation of poetry).

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

In addition to consulting with your conference leader, you can get help with all stages of the writing process from peer tutors at the Writing Center. You can find links to the Writing Center hours on the Drop-in Tutoring Schedule website. Extra tutoring help will be available in the week leading up to paper due dates.