Please choose one of the topics below; if you want to design your own topic, you must clear this with me in advance. General Instructions.
1. Lucan often seems to strike a familiar (i.e. to us) postmodern note in his pervasive aestheticizing of violence and its spectatorship (cf., for example, the lavishly violent films of David Lynch or the John Wick franchise), which are closely bound with his epic's central theme of the cutting, slicing, fragmentation, and ultimate disintegration of the Roman body politic. Compare and contrast the thematization of violence in a modern work in film, literature, or the visual arts with that in Lucan's in Civil War.
2. Closely analyze the related motifs of food and hunger as they are developed in Seneca’s Thyestes. How do these motifs contribute to an understanding of the play’s broader themes and meanings (psychological, social, political, etc.)?
3. Compare and contrast Seneca’s Medea and Euripides’ Medea, with a focus on how each play represents its title character. In what significant ways does Seneca diverge from Euripides in his treatment of Medea's character? What are the broader consequences of Seneca’s departures in terms of his play's overall effect(s) on audiences?
4. Compare and contrast a literary or historical – including the living – figure with Petronius' Trimalchio (Trimalchio was the primary model for the titular character of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby). What characteristics do Trimalchio and the figure you've chosen share, and how do they differ?
5. Choose a modern love song for comparative analysis with a poem we've read by Catullus or the elegists, i.e. Ovid, Propertius, Sulpicia, and Tibullus. (The possibilities are vast: for example, find a song that shares some compelling thematic connections with a paraclausithyron we read.) In organizing your analysis, you might consider such aspects as the treatment of similar themes, tropes, and ideas, similar or divergent styles of presentation and expression, relationships between speakers and addressees, etc. Be sure to account for contrasts that may be attributable to the differing modes of text (primarily to be read, whether silently or aloud) and song (to be heard in musical performance).
6. Read Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Julius Caesar (1599). Write a comparative analysis of the character of Julius Caesar as he is presented in Lucan's Civil War and Shakespeare's representation of this same figure in his play.