Paper Topics | Fall 2013 | Paper 3
Due Saturday, November 16th, 5 p.m., in your conference leader's Eliot Hall mailbox.
Length: 5 double-spaced pages (1,500 words)
Choose one of the following questions:
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Bad things happen to good people; or, life just does not seem fair. For millennia, human beings have been aware of the gulf between their ideals of justice, and the world as it is. Both The Book of Job and Works and Days examine this problem of misfortune and moral order. Elaborate the understandings of what is "just” in either or both texts; what prevents its attainment; and how the text(s) negotiate and/or resolve that tension. You may focus on just one text, or compare the two. Should you compare the texts and their overall claims about the possibility of justice, please focus your comparisons on the texts and not on broad assumptions about the cultures that produced them.
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What is the role of women within the honor system portrayed in the Iliad? Is it accurate to say that they have a merely secondary role? Please include in your argument close consideration of at least two human female characters.
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"When I desire you a part of me is gone: your lack is my lack. I would not be in want of you unless you had partaken of me, the lover reasons. 'A hole is being gnawed in [my] vitals' says Sappho [...]. 'You have snatched the lungs out of my chest' [...] and 'pierced me right through the bones' says Archilochos” (Carson, Eros the Bittersweet 32). Anne Carson argues in Eros the Bittersweet that lyric love poetry provokes us to notice that the self has its limits even as desire calls attention to the potential permeability of these boundaries. Using at least two (but no more than three) of the poems from Miller's collection, explore how the poets formulate the boundaries of the self and what the "self" means in Greek lyric.
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Choose two of the objects shown in our lectures on art or visual culture (Oct. 28, Oct. 30) and compare their modes of representing the body. Build your argument on careful detailed descriptions of the formal characteristics of each object (shape, scale, iconography, abstract patterning, composition, depiction of space, color). You might think about how the object changes when imagined in active use, or about how the object's negotiation of representational codes or norms speaks to questions of human agency (in relation to fate, or the gods, or other sources of authority) that we have been discussing in various contexts all semester.