Class #5 post-game

Post: Your group's 4-5 ideas draft questions
Kickoff: Ankita & Aubrey
Read: Guide ch. 23 & 25
Read: "Michael Kohlhaas" 114-63 (you might also like to read some of the introduction to Kleist... I'd suggest pg. 7, the top half of pg. 8, the middle paragraph on pg. 15, and the paragraph that begins on the bottom of pg. 48)
Answer: Your assigned study question. Unless I gave you the "12 Articles" or "Murdering Peasants" summary. Steve and Sarah Black can choose what they want to post.
Submit: Your Discovery Task #5 if you didn't do it yet... no credit after midnight tonight

Ideas Draft Questions (answer all)

1) Give a brief analysis of the two characters involved based on what you know of them and their status/objectives prior to the argument. (Chorus = character, if you do that one.)
2) What is each character trying to communicate, and why?
3) How is the dialogue structured? Does it change, for instance, from one kind of conversation to another? Do one or both characters shift tone or strategy at any point? Give examples from the text.
4) How does each character represent him or herself in the argument (as a king, as a father, as a son, etc.), in other words what is the character's rhetorical ethos? And again, does it shift at any point? Give examples from the text.
5) How does each character represent/construct his or her opponent? Does this lead to any manipulation of emotion (rhetorical pathos) in the opponent or the audience? Give examples from the text.
6) What techniques of counterargument do the character's employ? Do they use any other techniques of rhetorical logos, metaphors, literary techniques, or what have you? Give examples from the text.
7) What are the keywords in the argument (especially those used by both characters, perhaps in differing ways)? How has Fagles chosen to translate them, and how has this slanted the meaning in a particular direction? (consult Aaron's Greek originals)
8) What could a director do, short of changing the actual dialogue, to give different emphasis or meaning to this scene? (this category includes the acting changes you made last Friday)
9) What did Brecht do, and why?
10) What effect do/would the characters' speeches have on the following audiences: the choral audience inside the play, the original 400s B.C. Athens audience, a contemporary U.S. audience (of regular theatergoers)?
11) Paraphrase the main thesis of your secondary source and choose two representative short quotations. Are you going to agree with this critic, disagree, or reorient/qualify what she says, or what? Are you going to address the critic's main thesis, or just use one of their smaller points? And where do you see using this in your paper?

Notes on Discovery Task

Starting with the article by Christiane Inwood-Sorvino. This answer was pretty good, but I think it confused the article's theoretical framework for the actual argument the article was making. A couple of others did this too.

The author believes readers do not read texts neutrally, but have some sort of bias and preconceptions that shape their interpretation of characters and the plot, and reading with these faults at times may limit the reader and lead to an inaccurate understanding of the text. By basing our readings off of the defaults set by our preconceptions, we are lead to emphasize certain parts of a work of literature more than the others. Additionally, by reading through filters of predisposed beliefs, we tend to label the characters as either evil or good, which leads to a very narrow minded reading of the text.

This answer was more directly to the point of the article being about Antigone, although the first sentence was poorly written and I replaced it with one from another answer.

The author states that the assumptions we have about Antigone are much different than those of the early Greeks. The original audience would have viewed the play from a different perspective due to customs and traditions they practiced. Antigone and Kreon both serve the gods, just different gods. The state buried soldiers, not leaving much for the family to do, and did not bury traitors. Also the doom of the people is because of the will of the Gods and one’s own actions. There is also the mentality that the public’s interests come before one’s own private interests. Antigone is basically the bad person to them. She also goes on to talk about rhetoric of certain characters to draw how Greek audience would perceive it.

This one was pretty good too:

The thesis of this article is that, in order to understand Antigone in the way it was originally written to understood by the Athenian audience, it is necessary for us as today’s reader to understand the ideologies, beliefs, and assumptions of the Athenian people in the period of time that Antigone is written. This is because by instinct our own ideologies and assumptions will shape the way in which we interpret the work. Some of the major points that the author covers are the ideas of distortion and filtering of the work due to prior information and knowledge, also the fact that people are too quick to evaluate and assess the work. An example would be Creon’s relation to the state and his somewhat dictator-like views. In today’s society we would consider this an atrocity, especially in a society that promotes the individual to a high degree. But contrary to our culture today, to belong to the state was held to a high regard, and any deviation from that would be considered blasphemy.

The other issue that seemed to come up was whether Antigone was a primary or secondary source. Primary if we're talking about Sophocles' original Greek, secondary if we're talking about a later translation (e.g. Jebb). But then, it also depends on what you're studying. Brecht's Antigone, for instance, could be a primary source if you were studying Europe in the era immediately after World War II.

Now for the article by Annie Pritchard. It's pretty obvious that this one was more difficult to read, so I don't want to give y'all a hard time. But let me just say this: just because you use quotations doesn't mean you demonstrate that you understood something you read. Indeed using quotations can be a kind of crutch that prevents you from doing effective paraphrasing. I thought this answer was good because it captured both the theoretical framework and the argument about Antigone.

Annie Pritchard challenges popular liberal beliefs that gender-neutral individuals, detached from moral, social, and relational contexts, are the most adequate account of the moral individual for a feminist ethics. She believes that we cannot read the ethical actions of subjects without taking into account the issue of gender because we live in and define ourselves by specific ideological systems. She does this by the challenging various readings/interpretations of Sophocles’ Antigone in which the interpretation of the heroine was made by underplaying her gender and ignoring the ideological systems in which her ethical frame of reference was created.

The problem was, when I went back and looked at what Pritchard wrote, I found that this writer had copied her words exactly without attribution. In an essay, this would be deemed plagiarism, and it stands as further evidence of how much difficulty y'all were having in putting this argument into your own words. So let's use this as a learning experience. The student who wrote this answer is pretty far along toward understanding the article, since she has chosen the most important concepts and put them together in a meaningful order. Now all she has to do is paraphrase. Maybe something like this:

Pritchard is a feminist who wants to challenge the idea that relations between individuals can be "gender-neutral" - an idea that is central to modern legal and political theories. Instead, she sees gender as a fundamental issue that underlies all Western thought, from the ancient past to the immediate present. Thus one effect of our modern myth of gender-neutrality is that it causes us to distort the way we read older texts that acknowledge gender difference more openly, such as Sophocles' Antigone. So Pritchard wants to help us see Antigone more clearly, but also to use Antigone as an example of the dilemmas that modern women face in our supposedly gender-neutral society.

I also think we should add this bit from another answer, which speaks to the way that Pritchard seems to link feminist theory with feminist practice (thinking with doing):

She also wants people to know that women should maintain their role as women but should also break out of the mold cast for them; they should become members of the sisterhood of Antigone.

The other issue that some had difficulty with respecting this article, was whether Pritchard is in agreement with some of the secondary critics she cites. She cites a bunch of them, but I'll focus on two in particular. You could say she agrees with Kathyrn Morgan and her theory of "moral madness," but I think it's more the case that she's applying this theory to Antigone... we have no evidence that Morgan talked about Antigone specifically. You could say that she agrees with Hegel, insofar as she says that Hegel makes mention of the gender issue, but I think for the most part she is disagreeing with Hegel, citing him as the first of a long line of critics in the past 200 years who have ignored the central importance of Antigone's gender difference by seeing the Antigone-Creon pair as symmetrical in terms of their agency/status. (This is where Inwood-Sorvino would agree, since she would consider it an attempt to map a modern viewpoint onto ancient Greek beliefs. But Pritchard goes further by saying, in essence, that even our modern belief that all individuals in a society like the U.S. are ethical equivalents, is wrong because of the fundamental and pervasive influence of gender categories.)