The Annotated Bibliography assignment is intricately linked with the research paper.  You won't be able to submit a research paper without first compiling an approved annotated bibliography.  The assignment is to construct an annotated bibliography of AT LEAST five (5) sources.  Three (3) of the five sources must be full articles from scholarly journals.  More than three periodicals is fine.  More than five total entries is fine.  Other entries may include entire books, chapters of books, essays in collections (e.g., The Cambridge Companion to Greek Tragedy is comprised of numerous essays from various authors). 

The annotation, however, should be more in-depth than a standard, one or two sentence annotated bibliography.  Let me be clear about exactly what it is I'm asking you to do here:

1. Find at least 5 articles - browse through the library's journal and shelf collections for articles relevant to the topic you wish to research. 
2. Read the articles - read attentively and take copious notes on the 5 articles you selected.
3. Create Bibliography - write an entry for each article in MLA format (as you would for a Works Cited page)
4. Annotate articles - for each entry, write a short summary of the article (approximately 2 sentences).  Then discuss SPECIFIC ideas or quotes from the article that you found useful (either positively or negatively).  This should be the bulk of your annotation and should be fairly long (about half a page).  Finally, state how this article is or is not useful to your research paper.  If you can fit more than two complete entries on one full page, then you're not doing enough annotation for each entry.

The bibliography entries should be in MLA format EXCEPT I don't want you to include the electronic source information from a journal that is available in print.  For example, if you select an article from Shakespeare Quarterly, the entire journal is available online AND in hard copy in the library.  I DON'T CARE if you used the electronic version or the hard copy (in theory, they're exactly the same).  DO NOT treat the journal as an electronic source, even if you downloaded the PDF version from jstor.

As with every assignment I give, papers should have one inch margins, typed, double-spaced with Times New Roman or Arial 12pt font.  Please be aware that the proper format for article information is a hanging indent, but the annotation itself should use first line indent.

This DOES NOT substitute for a Works Cited page when you submit the finished research paper; it merely must be resubmitted along with the paper.

Below are some examples of the kind of scholarship I'm asking of from you.  Bear in mind that these entries are formatted for the web and are, therefore, single-spaced and bold.  ALL STUDENT WORK MUST BE DOUBLE-SPACED.

examples:

Barthes, Roland. �The Greek Theater� in The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation. Trans. Richard Howard. L.A.: University of California. 1985. 63-88.

Barthes summarizes the details that went into production of the plays, how they were developed, and what the differences are between Tragedy, Comedy, Satyr plays and the Dithyramb. Comedy evolved more or less independently of the other three. Tragedy was peculiar to Athens, and although it was given over to Dionysus, it was more of a civic/secular event, which Barthes himself admits is a contradiction in terms since the secular and religious were not ever separate in the Greek conception � I personally find that hilarious because we have no problem labeling �secular� and �religious� elements in other societies, but I had to pledge allegiance to one nation �under God� every day in public school, and our coinage says �In God we trust�; don�t let me even get started on the �sanctity of marriage� and other such cultural norms and mores that intricately intertwine �religious� and �secular� spheres. Aside from the secular-over-religious analysis of tragedy, Albin Lesky (A History of Greek Literature, 1963) says all of this but, unlike Barthes, cites his sources.

Here�s an interesting idea: �[Greek] theater continued to enjoy a great public success during its entire period of decline, so that if we were to apply to it sociological and no longer aesthetic criteria, the whole historical perspective would be altered� (64). There is a summary of Aristotle�s analysis of catharsis and a careful reluctance to determine what Ar. �really� meant. Barthes somewhat contradicts Aristotle in de-emphasizing the action (being mimetic), but rather, the plays rely on narrative devices: the Messenger is the narrative device par excellence in tragedy who reports the plot action to the audience and actors. I haven�t read any Heidegger yet, but Barthes does reference the religious aspect of the plays as being temporal and spatial while theater itself (presumably the civic aspect) �installed another time, a time of myth and of consciousness, which could be experienced not as leisure but as another life. For this suspended time, by its very duration, became a saturated time� (77), and we will be reading Being and Time. It will be interesting to see if/how theorists� interests in space & time compliment each other.

Barthes also discusses the orientation of the theater, which I believe is what Rehm cited him for: �Now the stage, in our theaters, is the entire frontality of the action, the inevitable distribution of the spectacle into a front and back. In the ancient theater, nothing of the kind: the stage space was voluminous�. In the open air, the spectacle cannot be a habit, it is vulnerable, hence irreplaceable� (78-9). Two other quick notes: he gives an explanation for the use of the mask (diachronic ala Foucault�s Discipline & Punish), and he discusses the hierarchy of seating arrangements (79), which are interesting in contrast to Sponsler�s and James� works on ritual and the body politic in Corpus Christi festivals, medieval England.

Easterling, P. E. "Constructing the Heroic." Greek Tragedy and the Historian. Ed. Christopher Pelling. Oxford: Claredon Press, 1997. 21-38.

Tragic depictions are explainable through a lens of 'heroic vagueness.' It provided readily identifiable characters. The heroic age was the glory age for man, man at his highest and closer to the gods than modern (fifth century Athenian) man. Tragic heroes, in this mode of thinking, were similar to the outline provided by Aristotle: Homeric heroes onward were viewed as paradigms for anyone - an individual archetype.

Tragedy's faithful yet peculiarly Attic relationship with past literature is best understood in the context of an Athenian bid for hegemony both in and through literature. While it was true that the placing of contemporary issues in a heroic age setting made them available for interpretation, it did not lessen their importance in the present. Thus, contemporary Athenian values were both asserted and questioned by projecting them into the past through a tragic medium. In Oedipus at Colonus, Theseus distinguishes between Thebes as the civic institution it ideally should be and Creon, the representative of Thebes, whose actions did not necessarily coincide with the ideals espoused by Theseus (and Thebes).

In the Antigone, Creon is within his rights as monarch to forbid a Theban burial, but an exposed corpse was, in Creon's time as well as in the fifth century, a supernatural pollution. The seemingly obvious question of why the corpse was not removed from Theban soil, unburied as it was, but available for burial on foreign soil, never occurs in the play. Neither Antigone nor Creon ever associate decrees with locality, and they mention locality very fleetingly - Antigone's dismissal of Creon's laws as not applying to her because the realm of the living was separate from that of the dead came close. The simple solution to throw out the polluting corpse was forwarded by D. A. Hester (1971).

Gernet, Louis. "Anthropology in Greek Religion." The Anthropology of Ancient Greece. Trans. John Hamilton, S. J. and Blaise Nagy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1981. 1-13.

The basic question anthropology attempts to answer is what was the relationship of the human to the divine and vice versa - it's easy to see Whitman's analysis of Sophocles in Gernet: "Where among all of this am I?" The choral Ode to Man in Antigone is ambiguous or ambivalent toward the nature of man - Vernant's argument. Poetry was "a kind of popular philosophy" (4). The worlds of gods and men were always separate, always distanced; Pindar's poetry supports this as well as the obvious epic and tragic examples. Cult worship and the Eleusian Mysteries were about bridging two worlds: in the worship of Dionysus, through celebration of the human spirit; in the Eleusian Mysteries, through an act of communion and the promise of immortality. The concept of the soul had no part in Eleusian Mysteries or the worship of Dionysus. Death is represented in terms of a separation of the 'body' from the 'soul' in the poetry of Greece.

"Heroes are members of a separate race that lies halfway between gods and men" (6). They begin as human but transcend humanity after death. The idea of the heroic was closely connected to religious thought - obviously, if it's a bridge between the human and divine. "The idea of daimon gravitates toward a very distinctive concept of divinity: the divinity dwelling in man which is reveled after his death and sometimes even during his lifetime" (11).

Gernet, Louis. "Forms of Mythical Thought: The Mythical Idea of Value in Greece." The Anthropology of Ancient Greece. Trans. John Hamilton, S. J. and Blaise Nagy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1981. 71-111.

The basis for "value" is given a thorough analysis in this section. It analyzes value in terms of legendary and mythological backgrounds (including tragedy) as well as they ways it in which value manifests itself in the everyday lives of Athens (tragedy is, itself, an example of this). One of the more important points for the purposes of classical literature analysis is Gernet's work on Aeschylus' Agamemnon. Clytemnestra invites Agamemnon to walk on the purple carpet. "He hesitates and is afraid, but finally he gives in. As the door of the palace closes behind him, we know that he is as good as dead" (82). For more examples of how/why we know, in accordance with the socioreligious values of the times, that Agamemnon seals his own fate, see Le G�ni grec dans la relgion by L. Gernet and A. Boulanger, p. 84.

Gernet, Louis. "Law and Prelaw: Capital Punishment." The Anthropology of Ancient Greece. Trans. John Hamilton, S. J. and Blaise Nagy. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1981. 252-276.

This chapter proves that capital punishment is invariably connected to religious, ritualistic motivations. Aeschylus' depiction of Prometheus is one of an apotumpanismos (similar to a crucifixion, a pillorying), unlike those in Hesiod. This indicates that the practice was popular in classical Greece - Athens? Poisoning was a "permitted but controlled suicide," not a capital punishment per se (255). Denial of burial was connected to crimes against religion or against the state. Stoning and hurling were done to eliminate a pollution (not unlike stoning in more recent eras).

Konstan, David. "Divine Pity." Pity Transformed. London: Duckworth, 2001. 105-24.

This chapter really makes the move from Aristotelian and tragic pity to later Roman and early Christian ideals. In a nutshell, Konstan attributes the capacity and the expectation of divine pity to the infiltration of Hebrew theology on the Greco-Roman world. This premise is fairly logical since Christian theology is largely an amalgamation of the two. The interesting difference between early Christian versus "pagan" ideas of divine pity rests in Aristotle's definition: "Pity is a response to misfortunes to which one believes oneself vulnerable" (106). This, of course, rules out the possibility for the gods to feel pity for mortals. There are plenty of instances to back this up in fifth century tragedy, usually Sophoclean or Euripidean. But "[i]t might be said that tragedy by its nature raises the question of human suffering in a cold, indifferent universe, and is thus the wrong genre in which to look for divine compassion" (109). Indeed, in Homer, "For all his power, this Zeus is not so remote as to be untouched by grief" (109). "Divine pity, however, is not a quality on which human beings can safely rely. In general, characters in Homer do not ask the gods for pity, and when they do, it is always with the recognition that the result of such a petition is at best doubtful" (110). So there is a possibility for divine pity in 'pagan' theology...or at least Homer. According to Plato, "'the divine rests beyond pleasure and pain.' Consistency reuired that gods not suffer from the distress associated with an emotion like pity" (112). "The Stoics produced long lists of the passions, arranged under four generic headings: pleasure, pain, desire and fear. pity fell under the category of pain, just as it did for Aristotle" (113).

In sum, "References, then, to divine pity in pagan inscriptions are rare, and, what is more, begin to appear at more or less the same time that appeals to the pity of the emperor and other officials turn up in legal petitions, that is, in the second and third centuries AD" (117).

Konstan, David. "Conclusion." Pity Transformed. London: Duckworth, 2001. 125-7.

"Pity, in classical Greece and Rome, was an emotion that responded to a vivid representation of suffering in others, but was conditioned as well by an evaluation of desert" (125). No matter how much one suffered, a response of pity was normally contingent on questions of desert. "Yet a capacity for pity was regarded as necessary to humanity; in this respect, pity always had an ethical dimension" (125). "[T]he tension between pity as an emotion entailing a necessary element of moral judgment or appraisal and a less cognitive conception of pity as a response to suffering irrespective of desert" (127) did exist side-by-side with each other in the 'pagan' world, but there was a seemingly clear predisposition in philosophical, historical, and tragic literature toward the former. There's summary for all chapters, and that's about it.

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