Final paper 7 pages. Please choose one of the options below:
1. compare one of the writings from our final unit: the Argonauts by Maggie Nelson, Dawn by Octavia Butler, or The Passion According to G.H by Clarice Lispector to one text from the previous three. How does the modern author implicitly or explicitly draws upon a reading before? How do they differ? Why might those differences be important?
2. Or take one of the final three texts and either discuss it the way you would in the “Artwork and the impossibility of speaking” assignment or the close reading papper.
other assignments we had in the past that we can choose to write in the style of:
1) Artwork on the impossibility of speaking (due Oct 4)
Find a piece of art: a song, a film, a novel, a painting, etc. that discusses (or performs) the impossibility of describing something. The object can be “God,” however you understand God, but need not be. What is the significance of the film’s “set and setting”? What makes the mystical moments impossible to describe? If it’s beyond words, then how is it experienced? And why write about it if the artists know that the words will fail? The paper should be informed by the theoretical material we’ve discussed in unit one. Three pages.
2)Close reading exercise (due Nov. 1)
These exegetical papers are a chance for you to perform a carful, interpretive reading on one of the primary texts from unit 2: Plato, Plotinus, Iamblichus, Gregory of Nyssa, Eunomius, Evagrius, Ephrem, Dionysius.
It is not a summary or a place to cram in everything you have learned from the class. Rather it is a chance to show how a text functions. Papers might ask: How does a detail or trope in the texts produce a desire or affect? How does a specific moment in the text help us understand a broader theme? How does a negation or unlearning happen in that moment? Why is it important that it happens the way it does? Three pages.
3)Comparison paper Due Nov 29
Each week in Unit 3, we pair a medieval Christian text with a roughly contemporary Muslim or Jewish text. Compare two of the texts from the unit. They can be the pairing offered in the syllabus (e.g., Bonaventure and Al-Ghazali), but need not be. If you’d like to compare one of the medieval texts to one of the Greek philosophical or early Christian texts (e.g., Plotinus and the Zohar), that’s also fine. By comparing the texts be sure that you make an interpretive argument; that is, it is not enough to simply place the two texts side by side; your job is to make them speak to teach other. What do we learn about one specific passage in one specific text by comparing it to another specific passage in another specific text? Three pages.
