ELCS Essay Titles

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UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON

SCHOOL OF EUROPEAN LANGUAGES, CULTURE AND SOCIETY

SESSION 2015-2016

ELCS6082 The Poetry of the Afterlife

This module is assessed by means of TWO assessed essays, each of 2000words. Essays must be written in English. The two answers must not bebased on substantially the same material.

The commentary must be submitted electronically via the Moodle siteSELCS Assessed Essay Submission - November 2015 by the followingdeadline:

10am, Tuesday 17 November 2015

The essay must be submitted electronically via the Moodle site SELCS Assessed Essay Submission - January 2016 by the following deadline:

10am, Tuesday 12 January 2016

Write a commentary of 2000 words on ONE of the following extracts:

A.‘[Enkidu indeed ] they took to his doom.[But you,] you toiled away, and what did you achieve?You exhaust yourself with ceaseless toil,you fill your sinews with sorrow,

5 ‘bringing forward the end of your days. Man is snapped off like a reed in a canebrake!

The comely young man, the pretty young woman — all [too soon in ] their [ prime ] Death abducts them!

‘No one at all sees Death, 10 no one at all sees the face [of Death,]

no one at all [hears] the voice of Death,Death so savage, who hacks men down.

‘Ever do we build our households, ever do we make our nests,

15 ever do brothers divide their inheritance,

ever do feuds arise in the land .TURN OVER



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‘Ever the river has risen and brought us the flood, the mayfly floating on the water.On the face of the sun its countenance gazes,

20 then all of a sudden nothing is there!

‘The abducted and the dead, how alike is their lot! But never was drawn the likeness of Death,never in the land did the dead greet a man.

25 ‘The Annunaki, the great gods, held an assembly, Mammitum, maker of destiny, fixed fates with them:both Death and Life they have established,but the day of Death they do not disclose.’

(from The Epic of Gilgamesh , Andrew George’s translation of X.296-X.322)

B.Everyone who saw it was amazed,deathless gods as well as human beings.From its root there grew a hundred bloomswhich had a scent so sweet that all

5 the wide heaven above and all the earthand all the salt swelling of the sealaughed aloud.

And the girl too wondered at it,she reached out both her hands to take,

10 the lovely toy, but the earth with wide pathsgaped open in the plan of Nysa,and He Who Receives So Many, the lord,sprang upon her with his immortal horses,the son of Kronos with many names.

TURN OVER (passage continued)



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15 He caught hold of her, protesting,and took her away, weeping,in his chariot of gold.Then she screamed in a shrill voice,

calling for her father, Son of Kronos,20 the highest and best.

But no one, neither the deathless godsnor human beings, no one heard her voice,not even the olive trees heavy with fruit.Only the tender-hearted daughter of Persaios from her cave,

25 Hekate in her shining headband,and the lord Helios, brilliant son of Hyperion,they heard her crying for her father, Son of Kronos.But he sat apart from the gods, aloofin his temple of many prayers,

30 accepting fine offerings from mortals.

(from ‘Hymn to Demeter’, Jules Cashford’s translation of the linescorresponding with 10-29 of the Greek text)

C.I stared straight at the sun as no man could.

In that place first created for mankindmuch more is granted to the human sensesthan ever was allowed them here on earth.

5 I could not look for long, but my eyes sawthe sun enclosed in blazing sparks of lightlike molten iron as it pours from the fire.

And suddenly it was as if one dayshone on the next —as if the One Who Could

10 had decked the heavens with a second sun.

And Beatrice stood there, her eyes fixedon the eternal spheres, entranced, and nowmy eyes, withdrawn from high, were fixed on her.

Gazing at her, I felt myself becoming15 what Glaucus had become tasting the herb

that made him like the other sea-gods there.

“Transhumanize”— it cannot be explainedper verba, so let this example serveuntil God’s grace grants the experience.

TURN OVER (passage continued)



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20 Whether it was the last created partof me alone that rose, O Sovereign Love,You know Whose light it was that lifted me.

When the great sphere that spins, yearning for Youeternally, captured my mind with strains

25 of harmony tempered and tuned by You,

I saw a great expanse of heaven ablazewith the sun’s flames: not all the rains and rivers on earth could ever make a lake so wide.

The revelation of this light, this sound,30 inflamed me with such eagerness to learn

their cause, as I had never felt before.

(from Dante’s Divina Commedia , Mark Musa’s translation of Paradiso , CantoI.53-84)

Essay

1. Bremmer’s The Rise and Fall of the Afterlife concludes that ‘every agegets the afterlife it deserves’. With reference to TWO or MORE textsstudied in this module, discuss to what extent the poems’ depictions of theafterlife are conditioned by their historical context.

2. In Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell ‘conventional structures aresubdued, though not fully eliminated’ ( Wittreich). To what extent is this ahelpful characterization of this work’s ends and means?

3. ‘Self -disgust [...] runs through A Season in Hell ’ (Sorrell). Discuss.

4. Kryah identifies the subject matter of Zucker’s Eating in the Underworld as‘the transformation of the adolescent self’. To what extent is this an

adequate assessment?

TURN OVER



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5. ‘Paradise seems like another version of eternal torture. Let me spell it out.Perfection means sameness. Much of what makes life worth living is theprocess of learning and discovery, growth and change. We delight innovelty and laugh when we are startled by the unexpected. Curiosity isone of our greatest pleasures, and growth is one of our deepest values

and satisfactions. In fact, our whole psychological makeup is designed fortuning in to change, including our senses. When a sound is continuous, wemostly stop hearing it; a static image on the eye registers as a blind spot.Even art relies on imperfections and newness to create beauty or to triggerour aesthetic sense. […] The problem is, perfect means finished andcomplete. It means there’s no room for improvement —for change andgrowth. Perfection is sterile, in every sense of the word’ ( Tarico). Howmight any TWO of the poets we have studied in this module (including theanonymous poets of Gilgamesh and the Homeric ‘Hymn to Demeter’)respond to Tar ico’s assertions?

6. Analyse any ONE of the following techniques in poetic representations ofthe afterlife, with reference to texts studied in this module: personification,metonymy, epithet, parallelism.

END OF PAPER

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