Humanities 110

Introduction to the Humanities

Paper Topics | Fall 2012 | Paper 4

Due Saturday, December 1st, 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. Aristotle, the most famous ancient Greek theorist of literature, writing in the 4th century BCE, with the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and others in mind, provides the following characterization of tragedy:

    Tragedy is essentially an imitation not of persons but of action and life. In a play accordingly they do not act in order to portray the characters; they include the characters for the sake of the action. So that it is the action in it, i.e. its plot, that is the end and purpose of the tragedy; and the end is everywhere the chief thing. Besides this, a tragedy is impossible without action, but there might be one without character.

    Aristotle, Poetics 6

    (When Aristotle speaks of "the end" of something he does not mean the temporal end, or the last moment in time. The Greek word is telos, and Aristotle's use is close in meaning to purpose or point.) To what extent does Aristotle's account of tragedy fit The Persians or any of the plays in the Oresteia?"

  2. What claims do the oikos and polis each make in Antigone? To what extent does Sophocles resolve the tension between the oikos and the polis in this tragedy?

  3. How does Aeschylus's portrait of Xerxes in The Persians compare to Herodotus's treatment of Xerxes in The Histories? In developing your argument, consider the effect of the different genres on these portraits as well as each author's larger agenda.

  4. Both Aeschylus and Sophocles put women at the center of their tragedies, the Agamemnon and the Antigone. In what ways are these female figures heroes or do they rather problematize the role of hero and if so, how?

  5. In his Histories Herodotus discusses several cases of the reversal of human fortune. Select two such cases and, through a close reading of the text, explain what are, according to Herodotus, the most important causes and/or agents responsible for these two particular reversals of fortune. What do these two cases reveal about Herodotus's conception of human action and human fortune as a whole

  6. Arguably Herodotus and the tragedians are reflecting on democracy. Focusing on one, analyze the text with an eye to the author's commentary. What is he saying about democracy?

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