Assignemnt

Short Essay Prompts

Our texts for this assignemnt include: The Ramayana by Valmiki, the Aeneid by Virgil (Books 1, 2, and 4), and Kalidasa's Sakuntala and the Ring of Recollection, and The Thousand and One Nights (the assigned pages of reading),

Directions: Pick one of the topics below and write a well-thought-out essay of between 500-600 words; if you can do the topic more justice with more words, more is welcome. Please be specific and draw on details and quotations from the texts to support your claims.

When you quote: When you quote, please give book and line numbers (for the Aeneid), or act and line numbers (for Sakuntala), or page numbers otherwise. Remember that when quoting poetry, reproduce the lines exactly as poetry, not as prose.

For example:

For one to three lines, you can write them into your sentence using slash marks to signify the line breaks: "The horse stands towering high in the heart of Troy, / disgorging its armed men, with Sinon in his glory, / gloating over us-Sinon fans the fires" (Aeneid 2: 412-414).

For more than three lines, set them off from the text as a separate paragraph:

But now Venus is mulling over some new schemes,
new intrigues. Altered in face and figure, Cupid
would go in place of the captivating Ascanius,
using his gifts to fire the queen to madness,
weaving a lover's ardor through her bones. (Aeneid 1:782-786)

Then continue your own writing, referring back to what you've just quoted.

Choose One Topic:

1. We talked about the importance in the Odyssey of story-telling for remembering and staying alive and on track: for re-constructing one's heroic self and one's past as one talks, to keep acting in the present and be remembered after death. Odysseus's story-telling, too, included lies. Now think about story-telling in this recent unit. In the Aeneid, for example, there are the murals or pictures recapping the Trojan War, which Aeneas sees in the Temple of Juno in Carthage (Book 1); there's his own story-telling in Book 2 and the story he's told repeatedly by the gods about his future, which he needs to live out. It's as if he were an actor in the gods' or someone else's story. In The Thousand and One Nights, the story-telling must take place at night and be both endlessly entertaining and transformative, transforming the listener. In light of one or both of these texts, what is the relationship between story-telling and personal understanding--orpersonal freedom? Why do people tell stories in these cases? What happens when people listen? What are people NOT doing when they're listening to stories?

2. We've seen that women as daughters and wives must answer to the authority of their fathers and/or husbands in the ancient and early cultures represented by the texts in this unit. Yet we've met some remarkable female characters in these texts, women who, in fact, become the main focus of the action. Write an essay that analyzes where the power of these female characters lies and that explains their effect on the men they're involved with. You can focus on one character, if you have enough to say for one, or on several that you want to compare.

3. The sage, spiritual seeker, or ascetic in his or her hermitage is a kind of character we donot meet with in the Greek epics or in Virgil but that comes up in texts from the Middle East and from Asia. Such a figure seems the opposite of the ancient Greek heroic ideal. Yet ascetic sages are revered and even imitated, to an extent, by such male heroes as Rama in Valmiki's epic and KingDusyanta in Kalidasa's play. Sakuntala is fathered by one sage and reared by another. Using examples from the texts, describe what role the sage, spiritual seeker, or ascetic plays in the lives of the other characters.

4. In this recent unit, how have ideas of heroism shifted away from the model of the fully-armed warrior in the Iliad who charges into battle, or the hero as strong but crafty survivor in the Odysseus? Who or what are heroic figures in these texts? In what does their heroism lie? You may focus on one figure in great depth or develop an argument using more than one figure as long as you stay exact and specific and illustrate what you say fully using the text. Is there any connection between representations of heroic action in these texts and concepts of life after death or the relationship between mortal and immortal beings?

5. To get home from Troy is not an easy matter for Odysseus: "to go home" requires a ten-year, wandering journey-an ultimate test of the man's endurance-and the home he finds is not exactly the one he left. In one or more of the texts we've read in this unit, a number of characters have to leave their familiar home and journey-in order to do what? What are journeys, whether physical or imaginary, for? What do they teach? Think of Rama, Sita, Aeneas, Dido, Sakuntala, or even Shahrazad and all of the unsettled characters coming out of her head.

Text Book: The Norton Anthology of World Literature, Third Edition, ISBN: 978-0-393-91330-9.