Reed College
Reed College

Humanities 110

Introduction to the Humanities

Paper Topics | Fall 2012 | Paper 3

Due Saturday, November 10th, 5 p.m., in your conference leader's Eliot Hall mailbox.
Length: 6-8 pages (1500-2000 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. Analyze the similarities and differences between Joseph's experience of exile in Genesis and that of Esther.

  2. Lyric poets offer different models of the well-ordered community.  Compare the visions of the good community offered by two of the following: Tyrtaeus, Solon, Pindar, and Theognis.

  3. After looking closely at their diction, their imagery, and their use of poetic devices such as allusion and metaphor, compare Sappho's construction of love to that of either Anacreon or Archilochus. What do the differences in their approach to love reveal about sex and gender dynamics in late archaic Greece?

  4. Compare the Persians' portrayal of their relationship with and attitudes toward the different peoples who comprised their empire to the account of this relationship provided by EITHER the Book of Ezra or the Book of Esther.

  5. Xenophanes offered several criticisms of popular religion, and in particular, of the depiction of the gods in Homer and Hesiod.  In what ways do Xenophanes's criticisms apply, or fail to apply, to the portrayal of God in Genesis?

  6. What is justice, according to Solon, and what is justice, according to Job? What do these different notions of justice tell us about the Hellenic and the Jewish conception of the universe and human life?

  7. Carefully and in your own words, state and explain Parmenides's argument in 8.15-20 that nothing ever comes into or goes out of existence. Do you think the argument is successful? Why or why not?

  8. Consider what social class divisions are rendered normative, even natural, in 1) Genesis, or 2) Exodus, or 3) Kings and Ezra? What class interests are served by this text (or these two texts)? How does this text (or how do these two texts) serve to authorize, naturalize, and sustain those class interests? What are the material conditions and economic arrangements that make these classes possible?

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