Anatomies of Change
Winter Quarter 2004-05

 

Paper Two :

Second Paper Assignment: Anatomies of Change Winter 2005

Due Thursday, March 3, 11 a.m.

Wr ite a six to seven page paper comparing two of the following plays: Sophocles’s Antigone and Soyinka’s Death and the King’s Horseman , Euripides’s Medea, and Moraga’s The Hungry Woman. Be careful to avoid merely comparing what happens (their plots or stories). Instead, your analysis should focus on similarities and differences of form and/or mythic content or elements. Similar to final projects, you are being asked to consider how form (plot structure, genre, generic tendencies, and so on) interacts with mythic content, here in two different dramas.

Develop a thesis that posits a specific, debatable argument deriving from your analysis of the text provoked by one of the prompts below. Be sure not merely to summarize key points from the text, and avoid generalizations that cannot be supported readily with textual evidence. Avoid merely reiterating ideas from lecture and/or section, use specific quotations to support your claims, and ensure that all your claims work together to develop a unified argument. Your paper will be graded on its focus, depth of thought, and expository competence as per the grading guidelines—not on the number of ideas you present. Various handouts on writing and formatting academic papers are available on our course web site.

Papers should be double-spaced, using times or times new roman 12-point font, non-justified, with one-inch margins, and page numbers. Please include the title, your name, your TF’s name, and the date, single-spaced, at the top right of your paper.

Papers are due at the BEGINNING of lecture on March 3. You must submit your paper both as a hard copy andas anemail attachment to your section leader by the deadline. Please name your email attachments with your section and name as in the following example: 08SmithJohnPaper1.doc

• Analyze what “changes and what persists” in one of our dramatic pairings to compare the dramatic and/or tragic forms from two different historical and/or cultural moments in relation to similar mythic content or element(s) each work portrays. For example, you might compare how each tragedy of one of the pairs represents the “hero,” “the good,” “the human,” gender roles, “right,” or “love,” and so on. {Be careful to avoid overgeneralizations like “From Sophocles to Soyinka, love has always been X.”}
• Although we have been considering all four plays primarily as tragedies, each play may include other generic tendencies. For example, each may contain lyric or epic/narrative tendencies or moments, or comic or romantic elements, and so on. Analyze such tendencies in two of the plays listed above to consider how these other generic tendencies affect the dramatic elements and/or content of each play.
• We have examined Aristotelian and/or Hegelian models of understanding drama, as well as examples of what might get left out when we assume particular plays conform to either or both of these theories. Write an essay comparing two of the above plays to analyze how each play is both subject to and exceeds an Aristotelian and/or Hegelian interpretation. {Another way to think of this might be to consider ways in which each play contributes to and/or subverts orthodoxy.}
• Discuss the interplay between myth or ritual and dramatic action in two of the plays listed above. You may want to consider how myth and ritual affect our notions of character, plot, peripety, among other concepts we frequently use to discuss dramatic works. For example, if the specific characters and actions are “repetitions” of characters and actions the audience already knows from previous iterations, how do the plays that reiterate such well-known characters and actions generate a compelling sense of drama?

Happy writing!