Shakespeare’S The Merchant Of Venice, Qanon And Blood Libel, 2022 University of Mary Washington
Shakespeare’S The Merchant Of Venice, Qanon And Blood Libel, Georga Hackworth
Student Research Submissions
Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, QAnon, and Blood Libel explores the contemporary relevance of the work of Shakespeare. The Jewish blood libel was first mentioned by Socrates. Whether Socrates was literal or using an allegory is unknown. What is known, is the story was repeated and used as the basis for a conspiracy theory targeting Jews stating they kill Christian Children to make unleavened Passover bread. This idea has resulted in stereotypes and Jews being the scapegoats for all the ills of the world. William Shakespeare played on this idea in The Merchant of Venice, using a blood libel to …
An Illustrated Metamorphoses, 2022 University of Nevada, Las Vegas
An Illustrated Metamorphoses, Alexandria Devlin
Undergraduate Research Symposium Posters
This project was a comic consisting of five different myths from Ovid's Metamorphoses. My goal was to make it easier and more enjoyable for audiences to read classical myths, and give these stories a way to shine in the 21st century. Myths from many different cultures have been adapted into comics, but direct depictions are much less common than shaping mythological figures to fit a new story. I have yet to find a direct comic adaptation of Metamorphoses. Ovid's Metamorphoses is full of rich and interesting stories and deserves to be represented alongside other mythological tales.
By The Power Vesta-Ed In Me: The Power Of The Vestal Virgins And Those Who Took Advantage Of It, 2022 Macalester College
By The Power Vesta-Ed In Me: The Power Of The Vestal Virgins And Those Who Took Advantage Of It, Elena M. Stanley
Classical Mediterranean and Middle East Honors Projects
Vestal Virgins were high ranking members of the Roman elite. Due to the priestesses’ elevated standing, Romans made use of their inherent privileges. Through analyses of case studies from ancient authors and archaeology, I identify three ways Romans wielded Vestal power: familial connections, financial and material resources, and political sway. I end by exploring cases of crimen incesti, the crime of unchastity, which highlight all three forms. The Vestals were influential women who shared access to power in different ways. The Vestals were active participants in the social and political world of Rome.
Humanity And Nature: From Vergil To Modernity, 2022 Xavier University, Cincinnati, OH
Humanity And Nature: From Vergil To Modernity, Aaron Ticknor
Honors Bachelor of Arts
Though ecology is a relatively new field of study, the human relationship to nature has shifted and changed throughout history. In antiquity, it has been understood by scholarly consensus that there was a more general understanding of nature as a living force with spirit, for example the Roman animist concept of numen, and humanity being one with nature. In modernity, however, under the influence of Rene Descartes and Francis Bacon, nature is seen as completely separate from humanity and devoid of any value beyond the economic value of resources. Later philosophers such as Nietzsche lamented this shift, advocating for …
Jet Of Blood Vr: First Playable Demo, 2022 Rochester Institute of Technology
Jet Of Blood Vr: First Playable Demo, Elizabeth Goins, Andy Head, Mason Hayes
Frameless
A VR staging of Anonin Artaud’s 1925 surrealist play, Jet of Blood. The project experiments with virtual reality as a means to reimagine performance and frame the player, the audience, as actor. Ideas from Artaud’s philosophy such as the Theatre of Cruelty are incorporated along with spatial storytelling and game design. The project also seeks to expand accessibility to deaf and hard of hearing audiences through use of particle and text effects to visually express audio and sound.
Poetics As Rhetoric In The Works Of Horace, 2022 University of New Mexico
Poetics As Rhetoric In The Works Of Horace, Lauren W. Brown
Foreign Languages & Literatures ETDs
This project demonstrates how Horace uses rhetoric in his poetics in order to advocate for moderation. The first chapter focuses on the rhetorical strategies of the Satires, in which Horace uses a poetic persona with an ambiguous social status and that acts as a bad exemplum of the morals he advocates for. The chapter also explores Horace’s use of a motif where something that appears quantifiably larger is, in fact, either of equal or lesser worth, which also appeals to issues of class. The second chapter turns to Horace’s use of rhetoric in the Odes. In the Odes, Horace focuses …
Transforming Leviathan: Job, Hobbes, Zvyagintsev And Philosophical Progression, 2022 Howard Payne University
Transforming Leviathan: Job, Hobbes, Zvyagintsev And Philosophical Progression, Graham C. Goff
Journal of Religion & Film
The allegory of Leviathan, the biblical serpent of the seas, has undergone numerous distinct and even antithetical conceptions since its origin in the book of Job. Most prominently, Leviathan was the namesake of Thomas Hobbes’s 1651 political treatise and Andrey Zvyagintsev’s 2014 film of the same name, a damning indictment of Russian corruption. These three iterations underscore the societal transition from the recognition of power as being derived from God to the secularization of power in Hobbes’s philosophy, to the negation of the legitimacy of divine and secular institutional power, in Zvyagintsev’s controversial film. This examination of Leviathan’s three unique …
Cultural Collapse Of The Seleucid Empire, 2022 Xavier University, Cincinnati, OH
Cultural Collapse Of The Seleucid Empire, John Paul Mastandrea
Honors Bachelor of Arts
This paper seeks to explore the causes for the collapse of the Seleucid Empire following the death of Alexander the Great. The reasons for this collapse were numerous, but primarily focus on the administrative difficulties inherited from the Persian empire, the vast cultural differences within the empire, and the priorities of the Seleucid rulers. In order to show a counter point of a Greek state that succeeded in ruling a foreign people, the exploration of Ptolemaic Egypt is put alongside the Seleucids. The Egyptian Greeks succeeded in all of the ways that the Seleucids failed. By putting these two states …
The Name And Its Significance: An Examination Of Names In Aristotle’S And Plato’S Philosophy Of Language, 2022 Xavier University, Cincinnati, OH
The Name And Its Significance: An Examination Of Names In Aristotle’S And Plato’S Philosophy Of Language, Matthew Blain
Honors Bachelor of Arts
In the early 20th century, philosophy underwent a “linguistic turn,” in which philosophy, humanities, and even sciences made a redoubled focus on language itself. This turn was quite comprehensive, focusing on nearly every aspect of language such as meaning, reference, truth and falsity, logic, and the connection of language and reality. This renewed focus garnered a significant amount of attention and thought in the 20th century by some of its most prominent thinkers of both the analytic and even continental traditions. In the analytic tradition, Wittgenstein, in his Tractatus, saw language as the logical limit of our known world, out …
The Impact Of Women On The Life And Legacy Of Mark Antony, 2022 University of Nebraska - Lincoln
The Impact Of Women On The Life And Legacy Of Mark Antony, Lauren E. Yaple
Honors Theses
Throughout the life of Mark Antony, the women he became involved with had a large impact on his political career, life, and legacy. These women, such as Fulvia and Cleopatra, used Antony as a means to achieve their own political, economic, and personal goals and were able to gain power in a very anti-feminist society through their relationships with and manipulations of him, affecting the career of Antony in many ways including his politics and his actions as a military commander, as showcased by the examination of primary sources from the late Roman Republic and early Roman empire periods. This …
Oedipus Der Tyrann: Zur Titelwahl Und Zum Begriff Des ›Tyrannen‹ In Hölderlins Übersetzung Des Sophokleischen Oedipus Tyrannus, 2022 University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Oedipus Der Tyrann: Zur Titelwahl Und Zum Begriff Des ›Tyrannen‹ In Hölderlins Übersetzung Des Sophokleischen Oedipus Tyrannus, Priscilla A. Hayden-Roy
German Language and Literature Papers
Zusammenfassung-- Im Jahr 1804 erschien Hölderlins zweibändige Übersetzung, Die Trauerspiele des Sophokles, bestehend aus Oedipus der Tyrann und Antigonae. Zeitgenossen haben u.a. die Titelwahl für seine Ödipus-Tragödie beanstandet, die, so ein Rezensent, gleich vorweg die mangelhaften Griechischkenntnisse des Übersetzers verrate. In diesem Aufsatz wird zunächst die Geschichte des Titels von Sophokles’ erster Ödipus-Tragödie skizziert, von der handschriftlichen Überlieferung bis hin zu volkssprachlichen Übersetzungen und Bearbeitungen, die vor 1805 im europäischen Raum erschienen sind. Der Fokus wird dann ausgeweitet auf die antike Bedeutung von tyrannos und Sophokles’ Verwendung von dieser und anderen Herrscherbezeichnungen in diesem Werk. Eine Analyse von …
Confucianism And Folklore In Vietnamese Fantasy Short Stories: The Case Of Ghost Stories , 2022 HU_University of Education
Confucianism And Folklore In Vietnamese Fantasy Short Stories: The Case Of Ghost Stories , Nguyen Thi Kim Ngan
CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture
Truyền kỳ, which is a genre of fantasy short stories, was formed and developed in the historic period of medieval literature of Vietnam in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Despite being derived from a similar Chinese genre, the truyền kỳ of Vietnam was the work of the endogenous development of the national fantasy short story, which was closely associated with folk literature and historical prose. However, at the time of its inception, as well as at the glorious top of this genre, truyền kỳ had never been accepted as an official genre. It was rather a metaphor for unorthodox discourse …
Emotion In Plato's Trial Of Socrates, 2022 The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Emotion In Plato's Trial Of Socrates, Thomas W. Moody
Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects
My dissertation argues that Plato composed the figure of Socrates as a three-dimensional literary character who experiences and confronts emotions in ways that other studies have overlooked. By adopting a dramatic, non-dogmatic mode of reading the dialogues and emphasizing the literary elements of the texts and their dramatic connections, this dissertation offers a new and compelling portrait of Socrates in the dialogues that relate his finals weeks of life: Theaetetus, Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo. This study in turn provides new insights into the genre of Plato’s texts and demonstrates how he exploited the dramatic …
Signs In Sophocles: Modern Approaches To Ptsd In The Ajax, 2022 Bucknell University
Signs In Sophocles: Modern Approaches To Ptsd In The Ajax, Charlotte Simon
Honors Theses
This project explores the relationship between ancient Greek tragedy and modern psychology, specifically focusing on instances of PTSD, both through the descriptions of symptoms and the cultural reaction to such trauma responses in both ancient and modern sources. The case study from ancient Greece is Sophocles’ play, Ajax, a dramatic depiction of a post-PTSD soldier who has a mental break and is faced with either living with what he has done or committing suicide. The primary objective of this project is to illustrate what modern psychological theory can reveal about the portrayal of PTSD in Greek tragedy and therefore also …
Contingent Catastrophe Or Agonistic Advantage: The Rhetoric Of Violence In Classical Athenian Curses, 2022 Bryn Mawr College
Contingent Catastrophe Or Agonistic Advantage: The Rhetoric Of Violence In Classical Athenian Curses, Radcliffe Edmonds Iii
Greek, Latin, and Classical Studies Faculty Research and Scholarship
The surprising absence of violent language from classical Athenian curses is best understood as a rhetorical strategy appropriate for getting the divine powers to enact the curser's desire to harm his or her enemies and to gain an advantage in the particular agonistic context. A contrast with the extravagantly violent language of other contemporary curses, which call for unmitigated catastrophe to befall their targets, shows that the fundamental difference between these curses is the audience that they primarily address, which shapes the nature of the request that is made in the imprecation. Whereas contingent curses primarily address the human community …
This Effeminate Stranger: Dionysus' Gender In Translation And Performance, 2022 Dartmouth College
This Effeminate Stranger: Dionysus' Gender In Translation And Performance, August Guszkowski
Independent Student Projects and Publications
This Effeminate Stranger: Dionysus’ Gender in Translation and Performance explores the possible interpretation of the character of Dionysus in Euripides’ Bacchae as genderqueer, specifically nonbinary. The project consists of a translation of the Bacchae from Ancient Greek into English which pays special attention to instances where Dionysus’ character is treated as somewhere between or outside of the traditional male-female gender binary, including placing emphasis on the god’s “effeminate” appearance and ability to influence other people to act across gendered lines. The groundbreaking translation refers to Dionysus with they/them pronouns rather than the traditional he/him and embraces this surprisingly well-evidenced reading …
Identities Of Armor: The Function Of Armor In Homer's Iliad, 2022 Bard College
Identities Of Armor: The Function Of Armor In Homer's Iliad, Eli Rosenthal
Senior Projects Spring 2022
Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.
The Wine And The Cup: Syncretism And Subversion In The Late Antique Christian Cento, 2022 Bard College
The Wine And The Cup: Syncretism And Subversion In The Late Antique Christian Cento, Abigail Clayton Blackburn
Senior Projects Spring 2022
Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.
Protean Forms: Three Studies In Poetry And Dance, 2022 Bard College
Protean Forms: Three Studies In Poetry And Dance, Isabella Spagnuolo
Senior Projects Spring 2022
Senior Project submitted to The Division of Languages and Literature of Bard College.
Ἔπος: A Musical Concept Album Adaptation Of Homer’S Iliad, 2022 Claremont Colleges
Ἔπος: A Musical Concept Album Adaptation Of Homer’S Iliad, Blaike Cheramie
Scripps Senior Theses
This thesis project is a musical concept album adaptation of Homer’s classical epic the Iliad. Inspired by musicals like Hadestown, Les Miserables, and Hamilton as well as movies like O Brother Where Art Thou and musicians like Bob Dylan, this album seeks to enter the genre of Classical Reception Studies. The album consists of seven tracks all referencing moments within the poem, written from the perspective of the characters to inspire empathy within the audience. The content of this thesis includes detailed chord charts and audio demos of each song, as well as analyses of the lyrical, musical, and thematic …