1) Response questions #1: Sophocles’s “Antigone”
Please respond to the questions below, in an informal journal entry of a few paragraphs length, or longer, for sure, if you’re inspired to do so. Your entry may be either typed, or handwritten and scanned. Feel free to include drawings or visuals as well. Please keep your completed response in an online folder, into which you’ll deposit additional weekly response writings, and then email your folder to me at the end of the semester.
1.Speaking to her sister Ismene about her insistence on burying their brother Polynices, Antigone declares:
“And if I have to die for this pure crime,
I am content, for I shall rest beside him;
His love will answer mine. I have to please
The dead far longer than I need to please
The living; with them, I have to dwell for ever” (p.5)
What is your impression of Antigone’s stance here, and throughout the beginning of the play? How do you feel it contrasts with Ismene’s?
– antigone willing to put her life on the line for family and for what’s right according to the gods, not a king
– contrasts with ismenes , ismene is scared, dont think she cares less about family, just doesn’t want any punishment,death, for herself.
2.As we discussed in class, some sort of supernatural event, as described by the guard on pages 15 and 16 (beginning with his explanatory speech “It was like this . . . “ p.15) enables Antigone to complete the burial, despite the guards standing on watch. Sophocles describes this event vaguely, likely as a way of intriguing the viewer. What is your impression of what’s actually going down here?
– gods power, will, to permit burial, do right thing
– gods law > king law.
2) Response questions #2: Machiavelli’s The Prince:
Please respond to the question below, in an informal journal entry of a few paragraphs length, or longer, for sure, if you’re inspired to do so. Your entry may be either typed, or handwritten and scanned. Feel free to include drawings or visuals as well. Please keep your completed response in an online folder, into which you’ll deposit additional weekly response writings, and then email your folder to me at the end of the semester.
- Feel free to refer to the BBC’s “Who’s Afraid of Machiavelli” documentary, if you watched it. [link: ] and/or the “Fortuna visuals” (on Blackboard)
Before Machiavelli, as we talked about in class, many others emphasized of the powerlessness of human beings at the hands of fate. Medieval paintings and illuminated manuscripts, for example, frequently portray Fortuna as a fickle and capricious goddess who spun her wheel whenever the mood struck her. Men poised at the top (bearers of good fortune) could be plummeted beneath or at the bottom the wheel (and be utterly destroyed) without warning. Comment on Machiavelli’s arguably more optimistic representation of man’s relationship with Fortuna in The Prince.
3) Response questions #3:
Please respond to the questions below, in an informal journal entry organized as separately numbered questions. Your entry may be either typed, or handwritten and scanned. Feel free to include drawings or visuals as well. Please keep your completed response in an online folder, into which you’ll deposit additional weekly response writings, and then email your folder to me at the end of the semester.
*Please note that the powerpoint which contains the images is posted in a separate document on Blackboard, under “course documents”
In a free-style critique (the type of non-research-based response we did on our field trip to art museum last Thursday), analyze ONE the works of your choice according to your own interpretation.
- Spencer, “Shattered Illusions”, 1997
- Dandini, “Judith with the Head of Holofernes”, 1670-80
- Wiley, “Threefold Defense”, 2007
- Lawrence, “Forward Together”, 1997
What do you think the artist is trying to say with the work? Back up your ideas with evidence, or examples, from the image. Describe your own reaction to the work. What do you think is the overall mood of the work? How does it make you feel? Does it remind you of anything (ideas, experiences, other works of art, books we’ve read in class)?
Feel free to comment upon any of the following, if it helps you describe what you see:
- use of color
- use of space (depth and perspective, overlapping of objects, use of empty space as opposed to space crowded with details)
- use of light (warm or cool, brightness versus shadow, natural or artificial
4) Response questions #4: Milton’s Tenure of Kings vs. Hobbes’s Leviathan:
Please respond to the questions below, in an informal journal entry organized as separately numbered questions. Your entry may be either typed, or handwritten and scanned. Feel free to include drawings or visuals as well. Please keep your completed response in an online folder, into which you’ll deposit additional weekly response writings, and then email your folder to me at the end of the semester.
At the end of class last Thursday, we talked about how there are competing theories of the original state of nature in Milton and Hobbes which influence their concepts of rulership:
inherently harmonious:
Milton
optimistic
the power remains with the people
lex (law) over rex (king)= the king is the law’s servant
metaphorical contract
rational government becomes the primary criterion for political legitimacy
attempt to dismantle the static law under monarchical rule
wrought with perpetual strife:
Hobbes
pessimistic
the king is earthly manifestation of God on earth, dispenses the law and is above it
rex (king) over lex (law)
bellum omnium contra omnes=the war of all against all
Choose one phrase or short passage from Milton’s Tenure of Kings and one from Hobbes’s Leviathan which you feel is particularly important to their respective theories of rulership, and talk briefly about why.
5) Response questions #5: Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar:
Please respond to the questions below, in an informal journal entry organized as separately numbered questions. Your entry may be either typed, or handwritten and scanned. Feel free to include drawings or visuals as well. Please keep your completed response in an online folder, into which you’ll deposit additional weekly response writings, and then email your folder to me at the end of the semester.
A reminder that you may focus more comprehensively on any of the questions below which speak to you, and skip or answer very briefly any which doesn’t.
1. In your estimation, why does Cassius loathe Julius Caesar so deeply? Choose a quote from Cassius which epitomizes his profound hatred, and follow with close reading analysis.
2. Why would you say Brutus is so obsessed with the manner in which he and his fellow conspirators murder Caesar (“Let us be sacrificers, but not butchers”, “Let’s carve him as a dish fit for the gods” (2.1))?
3. The play is called “Julius Caesar”, but why not “Brutus”? Brutus’s inner struggle (over the question of whether he should join the conspirators and murder his good friend) occupies the moral center of the drama.
https://shakespeare.folger.edu/downloads/pdf/juliu… And this is a pdf edition of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar
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