Oedipus Story In Modern World

Your paper must be in Times Roman font, 12-point, with 1” margins on all sides (note that you may have to change the default settings for your left and right margins), double spaced (set the spacing to 2, with no extra spacing between paragraphs; do not use hard returns). Do not use a justified right margin. Do set up proper headers. In old versions of Microsoft Word, headers come under “View”; in newer versions, they come under “Insert.” Follow the example of the sample below. The key to being able to put your full info on page 1 (without starting page numbering) and just your last name and page number on the following pages, is to check the “different first page header” box. You should have a title, centered at the top of the page, and then your text should begin (again follow the sample). No title pages. Your paper will be two (fairly long) paragraphs. The sample I've added at the end is 668 words, with 326 in the first paragraph and 342 in the second. Your target should be 300 to 350 words for each paragraph. In your first paragraph, you will tell a story that updates one of the works from our syllabus to a 2012 scenario in the professional world (see the sample in the last three pages of this document). In your second paragraph, you will articulate exactly how your story updates the ancient work, and point out what your parallel helps us to see (look at the last three sentences of the sample). It might make sense for you to skip to the sample now, read it, and then return to these instructions. Because the sample updates the San story of the lion and the hunter, you cannot use that one, but you can choose from any other work on our syllabus up to this point in the semester. Your updated story must involve a business or professional setting, as you see in the sample. I know that sometimes in class we talk about families, high schools, etc., but I'd like for you to be thinking about how the works we study might say something about the world you will enter after graduating from Morgan State. If you like, make your modern scenario have something to do with the specific profession that you aspire to after graduation. Do not make your characters have family relationships—and no sports stories! Also, I know that in class we have already “updated” many of the works, and your own update might end up echoing some of what we discussed in class, but try to show me at least some originality rather than just writing up your notes from class on a parallel that I sketched out for you. (Even the sample is much more fully realized that the simple parallel I sketched out for you in class that day. There are at least many original details in the sample, compared to the brief basic parallel I pictured for you in class when we went over the San story.) This is your chance to show me what you can do, so don't just show me that you can parrot back to me my own classroom lectures. There are students who will get carried away with the first paragraph (the story paragraph), giving too many details and sub-plots. Keep your first paragraph to the 300-350 word target, focusing in on the crucial elements of the ancient work that you want to include in your update, and setting aside the less central elements. Again, use the sample to gauge the level of detail you should shoot for. There are students who, having told their updated story in the first paragraph, feel like all the relevance is self evident, and so they do a thin second paragraph of just a couple of sentences. Do not drop the ball on paragraph two—this is arguably the crucial paragraph in which you show me your full grasp of the ancient work and its significance. In the second paragraph, you need to articulate fully and explicitly the points that are only implicit in the first paragraph. This assignment is intended to be fun to some extent—it's also consistent with what we are trying to do in the class, which is to find the relevance of these strange and ancient works. Note though that the assignment is not a toss off. What you turn in should reflect a considerable amount of thought on your part, a genuine understanding of the work you choose, and much care in articulating your ideas. What will be the criteria for judging your paper (what is your grade to be based on)? - 1) It should be clear that you have read the instructions carefully, have studied the sample, and have written your paper accordingly. I do not like to waste my time giving you extensive materials like this, only to have you ignore them. You may consult me for clarification about the assignment, but not before reading the instructions and sample carefully. I.e., do not come straight to me, especially at the last minute, and ask, “so what are we supposed to do?” - 2) Your contemporary parallel should truly connect to the work from our syllabus in at least some ways that are crucial to the meaning of the work. Of course there will be differences, but some essential element should be carried over (such as, in the sample, the dynamic between the lion-shaman, the hunter, and his people). Note also the many little details in the sample that link the modern parallel to the ancient work, such as the bond created between lion and hunter after the lion has licked the hunter's tears, and the bond created between Leo and Andre after they've gotten drunk together; or the death pact in the ancient story, and the mutual job loss in the update. - 3) Your paper should genuinely shed some light on the work (in the sample, the parallel helps us to see the basis of the conflict between the shaman and the hunter, as well as the bind it puts the San people in). - 4) Your parallel should genuinely demonstrate the contemporary relevance of the ancient work (the sample shows that there are conflicts between ways of doing business in 2012). In order to accomplish this, your parallel needs to be plausible. Once I had a student do an update of the San lion story (it was allowed that semester), and she had it that an actual shaman worked for some company, putting spells on people and killing enemies by magic. I wouldn't call that a successful update of the material. - 5) Your paper should be well-written: grammatically correct, with proper spelling and punctuation, with solid sentence structures, and with the right words used for your intended meanings. As the paper is short, there is no reason why you should not demonstrate considerable care in getting the details right. The sample follows beginning on the next page: The Shaman's Way versus the Hunter's Way in the Ancient Kalahari and the Modern World Andre Smithson works for Transferco, a company that specializes in connecting skilled workers and employers in the shifting labor market. For months he has been trying to modernize the company's antiquated data retrieval system, applying methods that he learned in college, but there is resistance in the company from those who are used to and more comfortable with the old way of doing things—“on the fly,” with deals sealed by handshake. He is slowly changing the company culture, until he comes under the “spell” of Leo Solon, an ex-college-football player with a strong personal magnetism, but also with a secret fear of Smithson's modern methods. Solon gets Smithson, against his better judgment, to go after work to the bar around the corner, where the two drink enough beer and shots of whiskey that they are intoxicated. Solon, who holds his liquor better than Smithson, somehow gets Smithson home, helps him get to the toilet bowl to vomit, and puts him to bed. From that day, Solon seems to feel that his and Smithson's destinies at the company are somehow intertwined. He persuades the company that he and Smithson should work together on the big new City Corp account, but then blocks Smithson from using his reliable, computer-analysis based methods. Instead he somehow ropes him in to a risky venture in which the two take City Corp's top executives to a bar, drink too much, make a scene involving some strippers and perhaps a pass at one of the executive's wives (or maybe daughter), punch another exec in the jaw, and so on. Transferco is forced to dismiss both Solon and Smithson, though Smithson had been only halfway through the update of the data system, and it regrets losing his expertise. Smithson is distraught, but Solon puts his arm around him and assures him, “It's OK buddy, we'll find a new job together! You and me to the bitter end.” This is not what Smithson wants to hear. Smithson's and Solon's story is an updated version of “The Young Man of the Ancient Race, Who was Carried Off by a Lion When Asleep in the Field,” told by the San, a hunter-gatherer people from the Kalahari desert region of Southwest Africa. The young man, a hunter, is like Andre Smithson. He uses logical problem-solving (like moving in a zigzag pattern to throw off the lion from his scent, page 2), and the people at the camp, the “company,” clearly value him, offering the lion/shaman many “perks” (wives, families, page 3 ) if he will let the hunter live. But the lion is a shaman—he operates by trance and, like Solon, by the magnetism he radiates with the persona he has created for himself (as “lion”). He does not use logic, but relies on his ability to bring others into the feeling-state he generates. Therefore he feels threatened by the hunter's way of doing things (the “noonday heat” that “kills him,” page 1), as Solon secretly fears Smithson. He tries to exert his spell over him (making the hunter unaccountably sleepy, page 1), and in the process an intimate bond is created when he licks the man's tears (just as a bond is created, at least in Solon's mind, when he and Smithson drink alcohol together). From that point on, the lion/shaman does not care what happens to him, as long as he can pursue the consequences of his bond with the hunter to its inevitable end, their mutual death, just as Solon drags Smithson into their mutual “death” with Transferco. Thus we see that in the modern world just as 100,000 years ago in the Kalahari, the impulsive glamour of “shamans” and the logical methodology of practical people can come into conflict, often at the expense of the collective group. Ideally, the two types would work together, as when “shaman” sales people close the deal that was approved by the rational “hunters” of a company. The San story, on the other hand, shows a compromise in which nobody wins