Assignment 3: This assignment counts towards your “online assignment” grade and will thus follow that rubric and be graded out of 2 points. Please type your answers and bring them to class on Monday, Feb 23. While you can number your answers and you don’t have to write an essay, your answers in total should be at least 500-words (i.e. a page single spaced). These questions are geared towards preparing you for your first big assignment—your close reading. We’re focusing here on really closely analyzing the below passages and then relating them to the rest of the text. Your work should demonstrate serious attention to the assignment, and your writing should be grammatically correct. Although the assignment covers two specific passages, you’ll need to read The Eumenides in full first.
Choose one of the passages at the bottom of this page and answer all of the following questions:
1. Paraphrase your passage. In other words, put the passage into your own words.
2. Find an image in the passage that really stands out to you and your partner. What is important to you about this particular image? Why does it stand out? How does it relate to the rest of The Eumenides? (Here’s a definition of literary images: Image--a word or phrase in a literary text that appeals directly to the reader's taste, touch, hearing, sight, or smell. An image is thus any vivid or picturesque phrase that evokes a particular sensation in the reader's mind).
3. Describe the tone of the passage. Why do you think the speaker of this passage is taking on this tone? How does the tone relate to the content of the passage, in other words—how does the tone relate to what the speaker is saying? (And here’s a definition of tone: Tone: the writer's attitude toward the material and/or readers. Tone may be many things such as playful, formal, intimate, angry, serious, ironic, outraged, baffled, tender, serene, depressed, etc.)
Passage Options:
1. From The Eumenides, page 238, beginning at line 155:
Furies: The matricide, you steal him away, and you a god! Guilt both ways, and who can call it justice?
Not I: her charges stalk my dreams, Yes, the charioteer rides hard, Her spurs digging the vitals, Under the heart, under the heaving breast— I can feel the executioner’s lash, it’s searing Deeper, sharper, the knives of burning ice—
Such is your triumph, you young gods, World dominion past all right. Your throne is streaming blood, Blood at the foot, blood at the crowning head--
-I can see the Navelstone of the Earth, it’s bleeding bristling corruption, oh, the guilt it has to bear—
Stains on the hearth! The Prophet stains the vault, he cries it on, drives on the crime himself. Breaking the god’s first law, he rates men first, destroys the old dominions of the Fates.
He wounds me too, yet him he’ll never free, plunging under the earth, no freedom then: curst as he comes for purging, at his neck he feels new murder springing from his blood.
2. From The Eumenides, pages 238-9, beginning at line 176
Apollo: Out, I tell you, out of these halls—fast!— Set the Prophet’s chamber free! Or take The flash and stab of this, this flying viper Whipped from the golden cord that strings my bow! Heave in torment, black froth erupting from your lungs, vomit the clots of all the murders you have drained. But never touch my halls, you have no right. Go where heads are severed, eyes gouged out, where Justice and bloody slaughter are the same… castrations, wasted seed, young men’s glories butchered, extremities maimed, and huge stones at the chest, and the victims wail for pity— spikes inching up the spine, torsos stuck on spikes.
So you hear your love feast, yearn to have it all? You revolt the gods. Your look, Your whole regalia gives you away—your kind Should infest a lion’s cavern reeking blood. But never rub your filth on the Prophet’s shrine. Out, you flock without a herdsman—out! No god will ever shepherd you with love.