Your section leader has chosen a passage from The Aeneid.  Write an essay about this passage that analyzes the losses and gains of nation building, as they are reflected in the goals, public practices, and personal choices of Carthaginians or Trojans.  Remember that characters from different communities may view these "losses" and "gains" differently.   

Preparing for the Essay

Primarily your thesis should reflect your close reading of the passage.  However, you may want to use some of the interpretive skills that you have already learned to develop a complex and original thesis.  For example:

• What thesis about the relationship of costs and benefits in nation and empire building is presented in the Virgil lectures?
• How does the lecturer use "warrants" or sentences that explicitly connect claims to evidence when she demonstrates how a thesis can be argued?
• How can your passage be used as evidence for more than one interpretation?
• What clues can you find by studying allusions, figurative language, connotation, etc.?

Required Pre-Writing

• Reread the passage, marking key details in the language.  Register your own reactions in the margin, even apparently minor ones.  Include your own questions about individual words and phrases.
• Use the HCC pre-writing grid to develop responses to your most interesting initial observations.
• Look up key words in reference works to help you with "Why Is This Word Interesting?"
• Aim to generate more material than you can use.  Save "So What?" for last.
• Now focus on the "So What?" column.  Circle or highlight entries that might help you understand a specific aspect of social order to develop into an arguable thesis.

• Provide a detailed but coherent close reading that is unified by an arguable thesis.
• Demonstrate an ability to go beyond explaining the literal meaning of the words, phrases, and lines that make up the speech and make a logical argument about what the text suggests.
• Give the reader sufficient evidence to support the argument for your particular interpretation, even if the text is ambiguous.
• Connect all your claims to your evidence (in the form of specific quotations from the text) with logical warrants.
• Punctuate all quotations correctly and use proper citation format.
• Keep the reader on track by means of clear signals, clear paragraphing, interesting topic sentences, and relevant evidence in the form of quotations from the text.

Our version of The Aeneid is an English translation by Robert Fitzgerald, which incorporates Fitzgerald's own interpretation of the meaning of Virgil's original Latin text.  Next quarter in the Core Course, we will be reading more works that were originally in other languages, and we will be reading a chapter in the Writer's Handbook about translation.  The Classics program at U.C. Irvine offers courses in Latin literature, and you can refer to the original text at the Perseus website.  The close reading that you will be producing for this assignment does not require a lot of background knowledge.   Scholarly close readings, in contrast, may show knowledge of the original language from which the translation is taken or awareness of historical events that a freshman audience may not know.