These two essays due upon our return

These essays must be submitted in MLA format and word-processed.


Essay #1

“It is a common rule with primitive people not to waken a sleeper, because his soul is away and might not have time to get back” —James George Frazer "The Golden Bough"

According to critic Northrop Frye, "Tragic heroes are so much the highest points in their human landscape that they seem the inevitable conductors of the power about them, great trees more likely to be struck by lightning than a clump of grass. Conductors may of course be instruments as well as victims of the divisive lightning." Compare T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”; in either poem, the “tragic collective voice hero” and tragic figure function as an instrument of the suffering of others. Read the poems carefully. Then write an essay in which you explain how the suffering brought upon others by these figures contribute to the tragic vision of both poems as a whole. How does either poem address the universality of human failure and redemption?


Essay #2

“I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.” —Joseph Campbell

In many works of literature, a physical journey - the literal movement from one place to another - plays a central role. However, more importantly is the wisdom and knowledge gained by such physical journeys. Read Samuel Taylor Coleridge's “Kubla Khan” and “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”. Consider the two poems carefully. Then write a well-organized essay in which you compare the physical journeys of either speaker, the wisdom that they both learn in the end, and how the journey adds to the meaning of the work as a whole. Make sure to apply Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” and St. Thomas’ “integritas”, “consonantia”, and “claritas” in your final analysis.