Prompt: While many of our readings from the middle of the quarter focused on creation and beginnings, our readings at the end look instead at endings, including death—specifically, death as intrinsically wrapped up with longing and memory. Death and (cultural) loss are particularly of interest in Alexander Pope’s translation of Book XXIV of Homer’s Iliad. For this topic, choose a passage, or several from this text, and examine how it presents loss in conjunction with memory. Some questions to consider are: how does this tension shape the form of the passage? How does death relate to the passage’s ending? How is the preservation of the lost person/time/place/culture performed by the passage?
Further instructions from the professor:
1) The prompts above aren’t questions to be answered directly! As we discussed in the first two prompts, there’s a difference between a topic and an argument. The arguments that you make will vary depending on the poem or poems that you discuss.
2) Make sure your main claim is arguable! Your main claim (or thesis statement) should be a statement with which a well-informed reader could disagree. That doesn’t mean that it should be patently false or provocative for its own sake. Instead, once you believe you’ve developed a main claim, think about whether or not someone else who has read the passage (say, your seminar group, writing intern, or instructor) could disagree with your statement. If so, what are the grounds for that disagreement? Would it be possible for you to use that disagreement to make your claim more specific?
