Create an outline and proposal for the research you will conduct

An outline is a convenience to help you tack down the topics you hope to cover in a Final Paper, and a proposal is the extended and full description of your project (as best you know it at the time of writing). Understand that you are making a best effort to describe your project early on, but allow yourself to be open to growth and change as you conduct research and focus your intentions.

Here are some sample assignments, which you may elect to use or not use.

1.Compare the culture that produced the Venus de Willendorf with the culture that produces the Barbie doll. What common themes do you see in the Paleolithic culture that we share or have rejected in modern culture? Consider whether we worship Barbie, and if so, how? Consider society's view of women in the Barbie era compared to that which the artifactual record suggests was the view of Paleolithic women.

2.Regard Plato's view of the ideal from his Allegory of the Cave and compare it to Aristotle's essay, Rhetoric. Plato believed that artistic language was downright evil, because it could persuade weak-minded people to enact unethical behaviors. He believed, for example, that the bed the artist made was closer to the ideal in that even though it was a shadow of the ideal, it at least had function. However, the bed that the artist made was furthest from the ideal and was a shadow of a shadow and lacking even functional utility. Aristotle, on the other hand, believed that the only way to get to the ideal was through the abstractions of language and that the artist's bed captured the essence of bed far better than the carpenter's bed; that is, to live in a reasoned and logos-centric attitude of thought was to be closest to the ideal.

3. What does the term the Dark Ages mean? In what ways were the Dark Ages dark? In what ways was this society inadvertently preparing to emerge in modernity through the preservation of classical literature and scripture? What particular impact did Ireland have in the world that would emerge from the Dark Ages? Consider the literature produced in early Old English, a Germanic language with a Celtic imagination, expressed in Arthurian legend. What do these breathtaking legends of knights and honor have to do with our modern sense of ethics? What is the chivalric code?