FINAL ESSAY

Your assignment is to write an essay on a topic of your choice relating to one or more of the epics that we’ve read in this class. The “essay” is loosely understood and can include, with the instructor’s agreement, both academic and artistic work, as long as it is done in response to the course and includes an "artist's statement." Please get in touch with me if you'd like to do creative work.  Your essay should be 4 pages minimum, in 12 point font, double-spaced. More is fine, within reason. Please proofread your essay before turning it in.

Excellent submissions in the past have included character comparisons, essays addressing academic questions such as the style and function of Achilles’ shield in the Iliad, essays on modern responses to the epics (such as the novels by Miller and Divakaruni), poems and short stories based on the epics, a musical composition (a lament), a design pitch for a D&D-type game based on the Odyssey,  a fully developed D&D campaign based on the Mahābhārata, and a script for a play based on the Táin (including staging and costume design! ).  Some  of these submissions, obviously, went above and beyond the assignment, but short artistic submissions are welcome as well. Visual and musical submissions should be accompanied by a brief (half a page or so) “artist’s statement” explaining their connection to the epic(s). 

It is your job to find a topic you like. If you are having trouble finding one, I suggest looking through your 100-word responses and expanding on the one you had most to say about. Think of it as an opportunity to explore in greater depth something you found interesting.  Ideally, your topic should be narrow enough that you can meaningfully engage with it in four pages. I am not inclined to prohibit broad topics but it is my experience that students usually achieve better results by focusing on a single character or scene and thinking deeply about it than by attempting broad and abstract topics such as “heroism” or “gods in the Mahabharata.” If “heroism” or “fate” or some other monumental subject is really what floats your boat, then go ahead and write about it but make your essay as specific and concrete as possible by giving examples and referring to the texts—one way to have your cake and eat it too is to focus your argument around a single salient example.

If you would like to explore a research question and don’t feel that it can be done adequately in five pages (and, let’s be honest, almost no research question can be adequately dealt with in five double-spaced pages!), it is also completely fine to use the essay as an opportunity to explore the possibility of further research. For example: “I am thinking of X question and so far I’ve found X and Y articles and have read only X, which makes/does not make sense and with leaves me with the following questions. If I were to go further, I’d want to read up on etc.”

The most important thing I am looking for in the essay (and that goes for artistic submissions too) is evidence of your active thinking about something you read and/or heard in this class, your active engagement with our subject. So, ask yourself what is there that you think or suspect or hypothesize or understand (or perhaps do not understand) now, as the class is drawing to conclusion, that wasn’t there at the beginning of it. Was there a scene that stuck in your mind because it violated your expectations? A character that surprised you? An attitude that you are trying to wrap your head around? You can use the essay as a chance to think more about it.

No matter which route you go (and that, again, applies to artistic contributions as well as academic ones) your essay should be grounded in the texts themselves. You can respond to them artistically, but the connection should be evident.

Secondary sources are not obligatory for this assignment, but if your topic requires you to look up information not covered in class, or if you quote, summarize, or build upon work by others you must include bibliographic information (a footnote is my preferred format, but brackets and endnotes are fine too) and provide a bibliography at the end of your paper. Online sources are, obviously, acceptable, but simply citing a url is not. For online books, articles, academic blogs etc. please list the author and the title. If your information comes from an amorphous website which does not have an author or a title and does not refer you to its sources, please ask yourself why you are using it and move on to something better. 

You can see some examples of academic citations here: https://www.americananthro.org/StayInformed/Content.aspx?ItemNumber=2044 (Links to an external site.). The minutiae of it are not essential —for example, it doesn't matter if you use a comma or a colon in a book citation. What does matter is that your reader should be able to follow your references with relative ease. For example, if you reference says "Bhishma in the Mahabharata" that's not very useful - I can't look that up without flipping through thousands of pages. But if you say "Mahabharata 13.50 "(meaning book 13, chapter 50) or "Narayan 1978: 25" or "R.K. Narayan, The Mahabharata. A shortened modern prose version of the Indian Epic (1978) 25" I can look it up easily and any of these reference formats is fine with me.

Grades will be assessed out of 50 points on the following criteria: 1) clearly expressing your own thoughts on a topic to which you adhere (25 points) 2) use of relevant evidence from the text(s) to support your claims (15 points); 3) clarity of writing: logical transitions between paragraphs, careful proofreading before submission (10 points).