The Romans--CL-HY 216
Block 4, 2003
Links
Assignments |
Vergil paper, Tuesday of week 2
I. Pick either a passage or a theme in the Aeneid that interests you—because it’s important, hard to understand, beautiful or some other good reason. A passage is something like the death of Turnus on the last pages of the poem, or Dido and Aeneas in the cave in book 4: between 5 and 100 lines of text, containing significant detail. A theme is something like
- masculinity-rationality-coolness vs. femininity-emotion-heat
- traditional epic ways of foreshadowing Rome’s greatness (Jove’s prophecy to Venus in book 1, the lineup of shades in book 6 and the shield in book 8)
- fire, snakes and sacrifice
- emptiness (empty arms, empty tombs)
- undeserved troubles: Turnus’s soul “indignant”, Aeneas’s trip “not of my own free will”,etc.
II. Think whether you need to know anything more to understand the passage
or theme: Oxford Classical Dictionary or history book stuff, or a word-search
at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu
using their tools menu to find the English index to Vergil. If you do
need that, spend half an hour or an hour tops on research.
III. Then organize and write a brief (no more than 5 pages or 1500 words)
analytical paper on the passage or theme. This should be an efficient
analysis: start with substance, quote Vergil’s text and make sure
to analyze everything you quote—you can even say obvious things,
to make sure you analyze. Avoid the “essay” style that meanders
into a subject via talk about what happens “throughout” anything
(history, the poem, just avoid thinking or writing “throughout”),
talks for about three paragraphs about the subject, and then “in
conclusion” (avoid those exact words, in fact).
Probably you’ll come to a point after about a page or two where
you know more clearly than at the start what this paper is about: that’s
the key to writing the second draft, which ought to begin from some kind
of thesis statement that you’ve earned the right to make. The third
draft will then be cleaning up matters of expression—the right prepositions
and adverbs to go with the nouns and verbs used, fixing the spelling,
adding the apostrophes for possessives.
Hand it in as a printout or electronically (email attachment to ocramer@coloradocollege.edu)
Honor code reaffirmation should appear, meaning that you wrote everything
that’s not footnoted (or endnoted, or attributed in a parenthesis
within your text) to someone else. Matters of common knowledge (Vergil
worked for Augustus) don’t need to be footnoted, but any idea that
might be controversial, even if you’re writing it up in your own
words, should be attributed if it comes substantially from someone else
(other than Vergil’s text itself, which you should cite by book
and line number whenever you are quoting or following it).
Hand it in or send it electronically by 5:00 pm Tuesday, Dec. 2.