CLST 273G: Classical Tragedy - Women and Gender Focus Fall Semester 2019 Dr. Jacqueline Long

Study Guide for Exam I

Format

• cut-and-dried identifications: basic factual information (small credit per item, and a small component of the exam)
• passages from the plays we've read: identify context, and discuss briefly but concretely important ideas in our study-material that the passage illustrates most prominently - in the play, in the author's work generally, in ancient Greek conventions of performance, in the literary form of tragedy, in the conceptions of gender implicated in the action (distinguish ancient and modern presumptions), in the interactions depicted between individuals across boundaries of difference such as gender or class (each passage-essay earns a medium-small quantum of credit, but they add up to a major component of the exam)
• essay: discuss a thematic question, drawing for support of your contentions on specific, concrete evidence from several plays (the largest single item of credit; a major component of the exam)

Things to study

Studying strategy: identify important ideas and identify specific passages that illustrate them; be able to explain how the ideas work and how the texts back up your insights.
The goal for the test is to back up your arguments with concrete evidence. Be sure you explain clearly how the passage helps demonstrate your point.

The exam will be assessed principally on how clearly and insightfully you show you understand our plays and their implications: form definite judgments about the ideas you perceive to be most important in them, and be ready to explain concretely specific passages that demonstrate your arguments. If you also consider widely how other considerations relate to the ones you think are especially important, you'll be able to make good connections and answer any question pertinently.

You could be asked to identify some of the following items; they also contribute to your understanding how our plays relate to one another and to the development of drama in 5c BC Athens and the western literary tradition:

• major characters in each play we've read (who are they, what about them is important in the play or plays in which they figure)
• the identity of the chorus in each play we've read (who are they, how do they relate as a corporate character in the play to the principal characters, what about them is important to the play as a whole)
• dates of each play we've read (not that we can date many Athenian plays precisely, as you see in the Index of Dates, but have a sense of which plays are earlier or later, so that you understand what's going on when a poet refers to something that happened in an earlier play of his own or by another poet - the "chronology" in the myths the plays uses as plots does not necessarily have anything to do with when the poets wrote the plays)
• the playwrights of the plays we've read (including their dates and their distinctive techniques and thematic preoccupations as dramatists, as well as who-wrote-what)
• important parts of an ancient Greek theatre: theatron/cavea, eisodoi, orchestra, stage, skene, ekkyklema
• formal divisions of an ancient tragedy: prologue, parodos, episode, choral ode a.k.a. stasimon, exodos
• concepts and terminology conventionally used in criticism of Classical culture and particularly drama, e.g., charter-myth, chorus, climax, comedy, denouement, drama, dramatic irony, hybris, lyric meter, messenger-speech, miasma (and other conceptions of blood-guiltiness), myth, principal character, tragedy, trilogy
• concepts and terminology of cultural and literary criticism conventionally used in feminist inquiry, especially into the Classical world, e.g., gender, homosocial, male-norming, oikos, patriarchy, polis, sex, social class
• concepts and terminology conventionally used in relationship to Classical Athenian society and its institutions, e.g., Areopagus, civic cult, democracy, Eumenides, festival competition, oracle, prophecy, Sophists

• qualities and predilections of the principal characters of Athenian tragedy
• how the principal characters relate to one another
  • humans and gods
  • men and women
  • rulers and ruled
  • slave and free
  • native and foreign
  • rich and poor
• how social norms of fifth-century Athenian life color the tragedies' presentation of traditional mythological stories
  • gender (including practices such as marriage, mourning)
  • class (including concerns about privilege-by-birth, wealth)
  • community and individual commitment to shared identities
  • religion (including private and civic worship - the latter including the tragic festival-competitions!)
  • relationships within the oikos
  • relationships within the polis apart from the oikos
  • concerns of the polis with the oikos
• how tragic Choruses relate to the principal characters and vice versa
• how both principal characters and Chorus relate to the audience and Athens
• the function of tragedy in Athenian civic life
• competition between tragedies as part of a public religious festival
• how traditional religion and myth relate to fifth-century Athenian tragedies
• how the "new learning" of fifth-century Greece (the Sophistic movement) related to cultural traditions, and how it was reflected in tragedies:
  • language and knowing
  • the natural world and humans’ relationships to nature
  • cosmic order and humans’ relationship to gods
  • social order and humans’ relationships to one another individually, to other groups within human communities, and to their communities as a whole
• male versus female
• powerful versus powerless
• socially-constructed versus organic or "natural"
• public versus private
• rational versus irrational (n.b., this contrast means different ideas than the contrast between logical versus emotional)
• individual versus collective
• traditional versus new
• divine versus human versus animal

Strategic advice for exam-writing

• Identifications come across especially clearly and convincingly when you back them up by mentioning a specific point in one of our plays that illustrates your point.
• Both passage-essays and topic-essays want to address the question, "So what?" More formally, "What does it mean?" and "Why does it matter?" Show how the text works to support your insights. (Analyzing complex situations and seeing how they operate and why they operate that way, is a skill literature courses aim to develop by working in the world of verbal discourses. The same type of skills operate in every other part of life too. Therefore literary study is valuable for practical reasons, in addition to its being fun.)
• Explain your reasoning clearly, logical step by logical step. Take your reader with you, in order to persuade.
• With passage-essays, you've got text right there in which you can anchor your discussion very specifically. Take advantage of this resource for concreteness and detail.
• Connect the dots: when you want to add a passage to your discussion, in support of your interpretations or for comparison, show what makes it relevant - then when you explain what's going on in it, it will also help support your central argument.
• Building on discussions we've had in class and taking even further the understanding we've established together of Classical Athenian tragedies and the discourses of gender, shows how you are growing your own learning. It makes exam papers truly exciting. Education aims above all for you to develop your knowledge, skills, confidence, and the interest to claim an inquiry for yourself. Go for it!

Revised 19 September 2019 by jlong1@luc.edu
http://www.luc.edu/classicalstudies/