CLST 273G-001: Classical Tragedy - Women and Gender Focus Fall Semester 2019 Dr. Jacqueline Long

Study Guide for the Final Exam

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 a couple of the trends in our study-material that the 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 articulate clear, compelling arguments and to back them up with concrete evidence. Always explain clearly how specific details of the plays demonstrate your ideas.

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.

Terms and items you might be asked to identify include:

• major characters in each play we’ve read
• the identity of the chorus in each play we’ve read
• dates of each play we've read (even though we cannot date many Athenian plays precisely, as you see in the Index of Dates, be aware 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 fictive "chronology" in the myths the plays uses as plots does not 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)
• other authors of importance to the plays we've read: Homer, Stesichorus, Herodotus
• important parts of an ancient Greek theatre: theatron/cavea, orchestra, stage, skene, ekkyklema, mechane
• formal divisions of an ancient tragedy: prologue, parodos, episode (and agon as an element within some episodes), choral ode a.k.a. stasimon (in divisions strophe, antistrophe, epode), exodos
• elements of the civic production of Athenian tragedy: democracy, liturgy, choregia/choregos, prize-voting, civic cult, charter-myth (identify specific charter-myths in our plays); trilogy, satyr-play
• concepts and terminology conventionally used in criticism of Classical culture and particularly drama, e.g., aetiological myth, climax, charter-myth, chorus, climax, comedy, comic hero/comic plot, denouement, deus (or dea) ex machina, drama, dramatic irony, hybris, messenger-speech, metatheater, miasma (and other conceptions of blood-guiltiness), myth, nostos/nostoi, peripeteia, protagonist & deuteragonist, soliloquy, tragedy, trilogy
• concepts and terminology of cultural and literary criticism conventionally used in feminist inquiry, especially into the Classical world, e.g., gender, sex, sexuality, the (male) gaze, homosocial, oikos, masculinity, patriarchy, polis, resilience, social class, slavery
• other social institutions of the Classical world, including hero as a category of divinity, miasma (and other conceptions of blood-guiltiness), mourning-practices, national and ethnic distinctions, philia (close affective bonds), sacrifice, sanctuary/asylum, slavery, supplication, xenia (guest-host relations); Athenian festivals including the City Dionysia
• main outlines and major figures of myths that figure in our tragedies, including the birth-story of Dionysus and other myths concerned with the royal family of Thebes; the Judgment of Paris, the Trojan War and its aftermath, including the Palinode-story; the Labors and death of Heracles; myths connected with Theseus and Athens; myths connected with Jason
• current historical concerns reflected in our tragedies: the Peloponnesian War and its major participants and key events, including Athens, Sparta, Melos, Sicily; the Sophistic movement of intellectual culture

Themes and overarching considerations to consider (both for passages and for the essay; see also daily Study Questions from before and after the mid-semester):

Strategy: identify specific passages that illustrate important points, so you can by referring to them back up your arguments with concrete evidence on the test. Be sure you explain clearly how the passage helps demonstrate your point.

• qualities and predilections of the principal characters of Athenian tragedy
• how the principal characters relate to one another
  • humans and gods
  • male and female
  • rulers and ruled
  • conquerors and conquered
  • slave and free
  • Greek and non-Greek; citizen and non-citizen; native and foreign (not always the same questions)
  • family and non-family
• how social norms of fifth-century Athenian life color the tragedies' presentation of traditional mythological stories
  • gender (including practices such as enslavement, 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
  • rationality and knowledge
  • 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
• individual versus collective
• traditional versus new
• truth versus knowledge
• divine versus human versus animal - and transcendence between realms
• memory and reputation
• courage of enterprise and courage of endurance
• justice

And yet more strategic advice

• 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.
• Interpretation needs to start from evidence. As you review lines of exploration you could pursue in essays on an exam, identify statements and interactions in the plays that demonstrate ideas you judge to be important. Then be sure to refer to these key moments in your essay!
  • Passage-essay questions will supply you with text I've identified as interesting for concerns on which our discussions in class have focused: anchor your discussion in it. Build clear connections from this center.
  • Topic-essay questions will supply you with a concern on which to center: address it and build by showing how specific moments in the plays illustrate the concern's workings.
• 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 -again, anchor your discussion in what the plays say- so as 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.)
• Explain your reasoning clearly, logical step by logical step. Take your reader with you, in order to persuade.
• 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, 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 2 December 2019 by jlong1@luc.edu
http://www.luc.edu/classicalstudies/