LITERATURE HUMANITIES FALL 2001 HAM 407, TR 4:10-6:00 Instr. Göran Blix e-mail:gmb21

Literature Humanities: Paper # 2 (6p)

Instructions: Write a 6 page paper on one of the 4 topics below. Each of them calls for a close reading of a given passage in one of our texts: this means that you should exhaustively analyze the lines in question—the images, metaphors, rhetoric, ironies, allusions, echoes, motifs, themes, etc.—as a way of producing a larger argument about the text as a whole. You can refer to other places in the text, of course, where necessary, but do not diminish your focus on the textual details of the passage.

1. Read closely the section in Herodotus where Cyrus sets Croesus on the pyre (¶86-88), from “In this way Sardis...” (p.35) to “It is you they are robbing” (p.37). Explicate the themes, images, and ironies of the passage through a meticulous textual analysis. You may connect this scene where useful to related events in the Histories and to the larger historical/moral issues that Herodotus is trying to think through.

2. Using the following passage from Euripides’ Bacchae, and through a careful and minute reading of its rhetoric / imagery, discuss the shape that the tragic conflict between man and god takes in the play.

Pentheus

Take your hands off me! Go worship your Bacchus,

but do not wipe your madness off on me.

By god, I’ll make him pay, the man who taught you

this folly of yours.

(He turns to his attendants.)

Go, someone, this instant,

to the place where this prophet prophesies.

Pry it up with crowbars, heave it over,

upside down; demolish everything you see.

Throw his fillets out to wind and weather.

That will provoke him more than anything.

As for the rest of you, go and scour the city

for that effeminate stranger, the man who infects our women

with this strange disease and pollutes our beds.

And when you take him, clap him in chains

and march him here. He shall die as he deserves—

by being stoned to death. He shall come to rue

his merrymaking here in Thebes.

(l.343-358)

3. Read the scene where Oedipus blinds himself (l.1260-1279) and then justfies this act as a proper response to his fate (l.1370-1391). Discuss the possible meanings of this self-willed blinding, and explore the relations between vision on the one hand and knowledge, ignorance, guilt, possession, mastery, pleasure, and evidence on the other.

4. Examine Cassandra’s prophetic speech in Agamemnon (l. 1256-1294). How does this shift the center of tragic gravity from Agamemnon to the Trojan captive—and also in some measure from victim to beholder, actor to audience? Analyze the relation between “seeing” and “experiencing”, and between “illumination,” “pain,” and “pleasure,” using this passage as a key to interpret the aesthetics of the tragedy. How does the play answer and complicate the herald’s question at l. 566: “but why live such grief over again?” How can “disaster” be “luxurious” (l. 1268) and “agony” result in “shining” (l. 1182)?