Essay 1: Literary Analysis
Introduction
Your first assignment is a literary analysis of a passage from Virgil’s Aeneid. Literary analysis involves close reading—the formal description and interpretation of carefully selected portions of a literary work. When you close-read your chosen passage, you examine how its literary features--such as theme, symbolism, or diction--create meaning. Your reading is “close” because it examines details, keywords, or lines from your passage that you consider to be most important in representing a specific point of view. You are reading The Aeneid in translation; any translation involves interpretation. Robert Fagles, the translator, interprets Virgil’s epic as a poem “in two voices, one devoted to Roman prowess, the other to its human costs” (397). These voices can be “held in suspension, side by side, [or] as opposites that share the Virgilian experience of power and pathos both” (397). While they may leave us with a sense of tension and disharmony, they may also be reconciled in the course of the poem. Fagles’s translation captures this ambivalence by representing the “two Virgilian voices at odds, echoing an opposition between action and reflection, patriotism and personal assertion, public exaltation and wrenching private sorrow” (397).Assignment
Choose a passage from The Aeneid that reflects the two visions of empire Fagles describes: achievement and cost. You might focus on a theme such as barbarism, gender, virtue, community and individuality, friendship and enmity, beginnings and endings. Then, make an argument that explains how your passage characterizes the order of human experience in this epic.
Your paper must be between 4-6 pages in length (no more than 6) and will be worth 25% of your writing grade. For the purposes of this assignment, you will treat the Fagles translation as the primary source.
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