For this topic possibility, you will choose only one of the four options given in the list below. Whichever you choose, your essay should be approximately 1200-1500 words in length. It should be submitted as an e-mail attachment following the guidelines provided on the Syllabus page and the Orientation page. (Please review the Essay instructions found on the Syllabus and Orientation pages. Failure to follow those guidelines will result in point deductions from your score.) Under no circumstances should you include information in your essay from any source other than your textbook.

1) Write a cross-cultural comparison of the several creation myths excerpted in our textbook. These excerpts are found in the following readings: Reading 1.2 (pp. 14-15), which includes the Indian Hindu, an African, and the Mayan creation myths (do not use the Mohawk creation myth, which comes from a time after contact with European culture); Reading 1.5 (pp. 37-38), which gives part of the Babylonian creation myth; and Reading 1.8a (p. 48), which provides an excerpt of the Hebrew creation myth. Note both the similarities and the differences among these myths. Explore what some of the similarities might suggest about human perceptions and experiences of the world, and then, based upon what the textbook tells us about these cultures, explore what the differences between the myths might imply about each culture and what it needed from its creation myth. (Remember that additional information about some of these cultures can be found in several different places in the textbook.)

2) Write a comparison of the various conceptions of justice found in the following excerpts: Reading 1.7 (pp. 44-45), from the Code of Hammurabi; Reading 1.8b (p. 49), from the Biblical Decalogue; Reading 1.13 (pp. 84-92), which contains the entire text of Sophocles' Antigone; and Reading 1.15 (pp. 97-98), from Plato's dialogue called Crito. In each, what serves as the basis for determining right and wrong actions, just and unjust acts? How is proper punishment to be determined and applied? Explore what the differences found in these readings suggest to us about changes in the notions of justice in the Mediterranean world over the centuries spanned by this set of texts.

3) Write a comparison of the following readings, each of which presents a different view of the social order and the human place in that social order: Reading 1.12 (pp. 80-81), which contains Pericles' Funeral Speech; Reading 1.30 (pp. 167-168), from Sima Qian's Records of the Grand Historian; Reading 3.11 (pp. 43-44), from Machiavelli's The Prince; Reading 3.23 (pp. 141-142), from More's Utopia; Reading 4.14 (pp. 98-99), from Hobbes' Leviathan; Reading 4.15 (pp. 100-101), from Locke's Of Civil Government; and Reading 6.3 (pp. 28-30), from Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents. What does each author imagine the basis of the social order to be? What assumptions about human nature lead to that vision of the social order?

4) In the following readings, compare the views of women found in each: Reading 1.28b (pp. 144-145), contain Juvenal's Against Women; Reading 2.22 (pp. 115-116), from Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica; Reading 3.2 (pp. 11-12), from Boccaccio's Decameron; Reading 3.3 (pp. 12-14), from Christine de Pisan's Book of the City of Ladies; Reading 4.20 (pp. 109-111), from Wallstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Women; Reading 5.25 (pp. 90-92), from Ibsen's A Doll's House; and Reading 6.25 (pp. 113-114), from de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. What prevailing cultural view of women is reflected in each text? Does the author agree with that prevailing cultural view? How do you know? If he or she does not agree with the cultural view, what does the author have to say? What kinds of changes in cultural perceptions of women can you detect over the centuries from reading these texts? What remains the same?
 

Humanities 1301 -- Essays

Humanities 1301 -- Calendar

Humanities 1301 -- Introduction

Collin County Community College