Answer each questions (around 200 each) based on course material
1. What might the author of the story of Job have to say about the moral of the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale?
2. Why does Achilles return Hector’s body to King Priam?
3. In what sense can Penthues, in Euripidies’ The Bacchae, be considered a “fundamentalist”?
4. Some interpreters see in the character of Hamlet a modern Job. In what sense can Hamlet be considered a modern Job?
5. Thanks to Cervantes Don Quixote, the word quixotic entered the English language. What does this word mean, and how is related to the nature of religion in modernity?
6. What does Rene Girard mean by the “scapegoat mechanism”?
7. What does the term “cultural memory” mean, and how is the idea relevant to Hesse’s Journey to the East?
8. According to Eric Auerbach, why did readers of the early Gospels experience Peter’s ambivalence in the Gospel of Mark as moving?
9. Scholars have shown that Mark’s Gospel originally ended at verse 8 of chapter 16. Additional verses were added later. What was the narrative content in these additional verses?
10. Ovid’s collection of stories in the Metamorphoses is said to mark a transition from pagan to Christian culture. Explain this claim.
11. Briefly define or describe the terms utopian and dystopian, and explain how these terms are relevant to Dostoevsky’s story The Grand Inquisitor.
12. Does Shirley Jackson’s story The Lottery shed any light on contemporary western society and culture? How so?
