Throughout the semester, you’ve been adding passages from our readings to your Commonplace Book, and hopefully this has allowed you to begin to see some connections between our texts. Look through your Commonplace Book and find ONE topic to analyze in your essay. Then choose TWO of our texts for your analysis. Your essay should develop an argument about the significance of your chosen topic in these two texts.
Here’s a sample thesis (based on a text we’ve read and another one we haven’t, but it should give you an idea of the kind of argument you might make):
The Iliad portrays Achilles as an animal to showcase his inhuman ferocity fueled by rage while The Bacchae turns the women of Thebes into animals to demonstrate their irrationality as a result of exorbitant revelry. Close analysis indicates that both works view animalistic behavior as a product of uncontrolled emotion that can lead to unfortunate and unintended consequences.
Your essay should develop your ideas with relevant support from the two texts AND with evidence from THREE additional sources of your choice. These additional sources might be literary criticism of one of the works, historical texts pertaining to the time period, or primary sources from that era.