Topics for First Paper
Due Date: Friday 25 September by 6:00 p. m. Via Email to me. NO GOOGLE DOCS. Docx or PDF
Choose one of these and write an insightful paper based on our readings and your own analytical and inventive thought. Three to five good pages should suffice.
1. What is the Arete of women- include the goddesses?
1a. What is the Arete of Penelope?
2. Define and explore some ironies in the heroic dimensions of Odysseus.
3. What does Odysseus choose in choosing Penelope?
4. How is Odysseus marked by his travels?
5. How are a number of the episodes encounters with “death”?
6. Read closely a small episode and see how it fits in the larger ideas of the work.
7. How do the opponents of Odysseus help define him?
8. See Odysseus in the context of Gilgamesh. Find some useful specifics to focus your argument.
9. In a world of universal death, what is the meaning of life?
10. Make some good sense out of name, family, identity, transformation and endurance. Lots of good possibilities lurk here.
11. How do these works deal with the meaning of goods and wealth?
12. In a world of Beauty, how do we make sense of monsters and the monstrous and the prodigious?
13. Make some sense out of narrative sequence-why is the story told this way? How does the telling shape the story? Be sure to focus in on just a few select examples.
14. Compare the Trojan women of the Iliad with Penelope.15. Compare Helen as she appears in the Iliad with the Helen we encounter in the Odyssey.
16. Compare the emphasis on the nature of companionship at Troy with Odysseus and his loss of companions.
17. Argue that there is a presentation that makes Death seem heroic.
18. Does the intervention by the gods diminish the achievements of the humans.
19. Is the God Proteus a suggestion about the need to be able to change fundamentally to be a successful hero? What remains in spite of change.
20. Contrast Hector with one of the suitors.
21. What is the greatest challenge faced by Odysseus?
22. Using Gilgamesh, Enkidu, Achilles, Hector, Odysseus, and Telemachus, offer a definition of a few of the key dimensions of a hero. Be sure to focus on just a few issues- no catalogs.
23. contrast the way our three works begin.
24. What does Odysseus gain from all his adventures?