Paper Topics | Spring 2010 | Paper 6
Due Saturday, March 27th, 5 p.m., in your conference leader's Eliot Hall mailbox.
Maximum Length 1500-1800 words
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There are many ways to conceive of the unity of a group. Do the Aeneid, the Germania and Genesis organize group identity around the same themes or principles? Discuss what is at stake in the ways in which these different texts construct the identity of a Roman, German and Israelite people respectively.
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"Tacitus is not interested in private morality for its own sake, but for the light it sheds on public actions" [Ronald Mellor, Tacitus (New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 55]. Drawing on at least two episodes or characters from each text, analyze the relations between private and public in Tacitus' history and Ovid's Metamorphoses.
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Why do women appear more frequently in Tacitus' history or Genesis than they do in the histories of Herodotus or Thucydides?
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Focusing on one crucial scene in each of Genesis and Virgil's Aeneid, compare the role of specificity, abstraction and absence in their descriptions. What does this comparison illuminate about the narrative and religious uses of detail or the absence of detail?
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Ovid's Metamorphoses is constantly shifting shape and insisting on the plasticity of forms. Not infrequently, however, we encounter characters in this poem that are suddenly turned to stone. What are the implications of such moments? How do they illuminate the status that monuments hold in this text, in comparison to that in Livy or Augustus' Accomplishments? Your paper should discuss two or three exemplary instances in the Metamorphoses.
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"For this too," declares Polybius, "is one of [the Roman] virtues, that no people are so ready to adopt new fashions and imitate what they see is better in others." How do Virgil's Aeneid and Ovid's Metamorphoses represent and respond to this idea of classical Rome as an imitative, even absorptive culture?
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In consultation with your instructor, devise a topic of your own.