The final piece I wrote for the Humanities sequence was an examination of a shared theme over two separate works. I wrote about the failures of political and social institutions in Christa Wolf's Cassandra, a retelling of the Trojan War from a feminine perspective, and E.M. Forster's A Passage to India, a novel set during the British colonial administration of India.
Cassandra and Passage to India
I felt this piece best illustrated the different skills I developed and refined over the course of two Humanities classes, from close textual interpretation, to following broader themes in and across works and cultural contexts, to synthesizing secondary sources and other scholarly analyses. This essay had the most ambitious scope of all of the papers I wrote for this sequence, as it sought to extend a theme from an East German's account of an ancient classical war to a British novelist's contemporary novel on colonialism. Of all the pieces I wrote for this sequence, I devoted the most hours of writing, re-reading, and research to this one and I believe it shows in the final product.