Paper Topics | Fall 2018 | Paper 3
Paper Due: Saturday, November 3rd at 5:00 PM in your conference leader’s Eliot Hall mailbox.
Target length: 1400–1600 words
In this paper, you will continue to develop your close reading skills. Some of the topics ask you to compare and contrast two works. If you choose one of these prompts, you do not need to offer an exhaustive description of each, but be sure that you clarify precisely which aspects of the texts you are comparing and that you discuss those particular features in detail.
- Focusing on two or three key passages, compare and contrast the role of prophecy in Herodotus’s Histories and The Oresteia.
- Compare how Darius (in the Bisitun inscription) and Herodotus (3.61-89) represent Darius’s rise to power as the emperor of Persia. How do the differences between the two accounts reflect the divergent agendas of Darius as emperor and Herodotus as historian?
- Through close readings, compare the representations of marriage and queenship in two of the following: Agamemnon, the Book of Esther, the story of Candaules and Gyges in Book 1 of Herodotus.
- In Job and The Eumenides, one or more characters insist that they have been treated unjustly, yet by the end of both texts, they seem to accept that some form of justice has prevailed. Focusing on one or both works, discuss the doubts about the nature of justice that arise and their apparent resolution.
- How did the central scene on the façade of the eastern Stairway of the Apadana at Persepolis prepare visitors for the palace complex to come? You may want to consider the symbols used on the staircase and how the staircase helps create a processional and/or affective landscape. Whereas a processional landscape includes visual or architectural features that guide human beings along a walkway and shape access to a particular point, an affective landscape includes visual or architectural features that encourage particular emotional reactions. Please use specific details from the staircase to support your argument.
