Final Exam- Essay Choices
A Long Mo(u)rning’s/ Aftermath's Journey to the Depths
The EH 366 Final Essays from Which to select
Everyone must answer question 1
Select at least three of the other questions and write for at least two hours. Make sure you cover the wide range of our works
1. In the context of our work this term, make sense of Frogs. Dig deep and offer something rich and strange that renders fully consequential this dramatic satire.
2. Choose an author/ character from one of our texts and let that person serve as a guide taking us across the range of our readings. You do not have to visit all our texts, but cover the range and depth of our readings.
3. In what sense is the Infernal Journey a cultural Nostos- a troubling desire to return to some post-lapsarian home from which we would also hope to escape? Is diving into the wreck inevitably coming home again in a complex and insulated way?
4. Is there a deeply redemptive dimension to the infernal journey?
5. What two works might serve as a paradigmatic polarity for our work as a whole?
6. Let our campus be an Infernal Realm- make an allegorical amble (walk) about the campus and buildings. You may visit offices and individuals.
7. Argue the Marlowe’s Faustus foregrounds the modern world’s doubts and fears and life, death, and meaning… and afterlife. You may explore the effort to recast the very concept of the tragic.
8. What does the inferno/ underworld tell us about the upper world(s)?
9. How does the integrated totality of our reading this term create an implied unified text that is under constant revision and expansion?
10. Offer a psychological reading of two or three of our works in an effort to see enduring issues and questions.
11. [All too Easy] explain the value and function of two or three of your favorite readings for the course.
12. Pillage your notes and share with me some systematic- or fractured- learning over the term.
13. Make some sense of key gender issues across a selection of our works.
14. [A Creative Option] outline your own Infernal journey.
15. Share with me in a systematic way some key discoveries made in reading and discussion- connected to our class.
16. [bonus time filler for those who finish too soon]- how has/ does/ would travel simultaneously reveal to you something interesting in your self, your world, and your destination? Try to be specific and insightful. What must you go to/ through to become you?
17. Create or discover your own metaphor(s)
18. The Infernal Journey is also a journey inward that the human heart would fain deny but dare not. How do our works explore a dark and repressed inwardness?
19. Thinks metaphorically and imaginatively. When you come to the empty grave, what is it that is truly missing and what small tokens do you find of its absence?
20. Is the true infernal state a world of unconstrained desire and hope that can never be truly fulfilled, or is Lear correct, nothing in hell scalds as much as our tears of grief for the ill we have done, even when we thought it right?
21. Could Jean Paul Sartre be right, “Hell is other people?” Perhaps that is why Dante binds some people into suffering pairs.
22. Dashiell Hammett seems to image a Blakean urban infernal world. In what sense does Hammett suggest that the modern impulse has a deeply satanic dimension?
23. Do animals possess a salvific wisdom we lack? Do trees and plants? What of the rocks and stones; the air itself, the very emptiness of space; the silence of nothingness?
24. All our texts are about “transformation.” What text seems most like to become some continually transforming part of you?