This essay will ask you to think of the Oresteia as a Gesamtkunstwerk (“total work of theater art”), one that requires all three plays—Agamemnon, Libation Bearers, and Eumenides-to fulfill its vision.
Assignment:
Write an essay that focuses on the “problems” featured in the trilogy:
• The end of tragedy
Begin the essay by showing how Eumenides brings this “problem” to a resolution. Then demonstrate exactly what it is that Eumenides is resolving through an examination of the complications, tensions, paradoxes, complexities, etc., featured in the first two plays. To be clear, then, the goal of the essay is to start by making an argument about some feature of Eumenides, and then to work back through Libation Bearers and Agamemnon to bring context and complexity to the resolution. For example, you might argue that the Eumenides culminates in some new configuration of state-sanctioned violence. The question then becomes, how did we get here? What was happening in the earlier two plays to make this new arrangement ideal? Work extensively with quoted passages from all three plays.
