Empathic Civilization (RSA animation discussing the ideas of Jeremy Rifkin)
Sun Tzu excerpts from The Art of War (sections 1-8)
Sophocles Electra (play)
Luis Alfaro Electricidad (play)
Julie Taymor Titus (film)
William Shakespeare Titus Andronicus (play)
Helena María Viramontes “The Moths,” “Growing,’ and “Cariboo Café” (short stories)

You may not count two of Viramontes’ stories as your two texts, but you can discuss any number of them as one of your texts. You may write about Titus and Titus Andronicus as your two texts.

Choose one of the following four topics for a three to four page essay (750 to 1,000 words) referring to your selected texts. The questions are prompts to help you start, not ways to structure your paper:

1) INDIVIDUAL VERSUS COMMUNITY – How can individuals affect or control agencies like tradition and state? How do traditions and established power control individuals?
2) REVENGE – Do the texts indicate there is justification for revenge? How is gender depicted in the revenge plays and how is it used to convey meaning?
3) LEADERSHIP – How do characters in the texts—or the authors—understand leadership? How do the texts make you think about leadership styles, problems, concerns, and the role of leaders in keeping, restoring, or replacing social order? That is, what are the roles that citizens of a particular leadership style seem to be required to fulfill? What are reciprocal responsibilities in power relationships? Is leadership innate or cultivated?
4) NORMS – How does conflict establish norms for human behavior? How do the writers’ presentations of conflict suggest justice in and for the societies in which the texts were written? Do we understand our own society and the roles of individuals through those notions of justice (of good and evil)?

Your essay should meet each of the following content requirements:

(a) address your chosen topic in the texts you select in a coherent and organized way,
(b) compare and contrast your texts to each other to draw some sort of conclusion about them,
(c) discuss how your chosen theme relates to the theme of conflict,
(d) incorporate critical perspectives using the “Questions for Textual Analysis” which are posted on
the Moodle site for our class,
(e) be word-processed, double-spaced, in 12 point font with no more than one inch margins all
around, free of spelling and grammatical errors, and with an accurate and captivating title,
(f) document all secondary sources (if you use them) according to the Modern Language Association
(MLA) method of documentation, and
(g) be uploaded on Moodle by 9:00 a.m. on Thursday, October 9, 2012.