Reed College
Reed College

Humanities 110

Introduction to the Humanities

Paper Topics | Fall 2025 | Paper 4

Due Saturday, December 6, 2:00 p.m., to your conference leader

Target length: 1,400-1,600 words

Choose one of the following topics:

  1. Examine how architecture constructs and communicates power, authority, and hierarchy through the organization of space. With a focus on EITHER Persepolis OR the Parthenon, your paper should make an argument about how architecture and sculpture shape a viewer’s experience and express political ideology. You may choose to analyze form, sculptural program, ornament, and spatial organization, including plan, elevation, procession, and perspectives. Pay close attention to specific formal choices in the design of the space and consider how these choices affect how the site is experienced and understood. Focus on how formal and spatial design conveys meaning rather than summarizing historical events.

  2. Advisers and vice-rulers are prominent in the Book of Esther and Books 7-9 of Herodotus’ Histories. In their conversations and negotiations with the king, what salient rhetorical strategies do you observe? How do their words and actions speak to ideas about the Persian ruler, his exercise of power, and the precarity or authority of his subordinates?

  3. Oppositions between old and young appear throughout The Oresteia (e.g., between generations of humans, between generations of gods, between the chorus and the protagonists). What are the virtues and vices of old age and youth, and how does the trilogy mediate between the two in the end?

  4. In lines 905-965 of Agamemnon, Agamemnon is invited by Clytemnestra to walk upon crimson tapestries as he returns home from Troy. Through a close reading of this scene, develop an argument on how Aeschylus uses sensory imagery, material description, and rhetorical strategy to convey broader themes in the play. How does the language around the carpet suggest ideas about power, gender, cultural difference, or moral transgression? What feelings or tensions does the materiality of the carpet evoke?

  5. In Slavery and Social Death, Orlando Patterson defines several strategies that contribute to slaveholders’ domination of enslaved persons–the threat of deferred execution, natal alienation, symbolic reduction to the status of human tool, and generalized dishonor feature among the most prominent. Choose one or two of these features of enslavement and consider their applicability to the enslaved people who appear in EITHER Aeschylus’s Oresteia OR Apollodorus’s “Against Neaera.” Where do the strategies Patterson argues are used to reduce a human to enslaved status appear in the work? Are there additional or alternative features of enslavement presented in the works? How does the inclusion of enslavement affect the work’s exploration of political power?

  6. In the Book of Esther, The Oresteia, “Against Neaera,” and Lysistrata, the spaces in which people act hold cultural and political significance. Choose ONE work and analyze its use of setting and space–how does the work’s narration or dialogue make distinctions between different spaces? What kinds of activities occur in a particular setting, and how do these actions ascribe meaning and value to the space? How does space produce social distinctions, such as hierarchies of power, legal distinctions between citizens and noncitizens, or gender differences? What is the relationship between different settings within the work, and how do contrasts between different places convey information about the polities, people, and cultures at issue in the work?

  7. In consultation with your conference leader, devise your own topic.

Using generative artificial intelligence or large language models such as ChatGPT to compose all or part of your paper will be considered academic misconduct.