I don’t quite have any specific ideas or topics in mind for my thesis yet, but I do know that I am interested in mythology, primarily the actual stories of the myths. I’ve always loved stories and narratives, so I enjoy reading about all the gods and heroes. My favorite texts include Hesiod’s Theogony, the works of Homer, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, some of the Homeric Hymns, and Greek Tragedies such as Antigone, Medea, and the Bacchae. I don’t know yet if I’d prefer to work on one text specifically or a project that spans over multiple texts, but there’s not really one text or theme that stands out to me or catches my attention. I could maybe do an analysis of a specific god or goddess (or even another type of mythological figure) throughout mythological literature, or a comparison of similar stories told in different texts, or something about the female figures in the texts (Penelope, Antigone, Medea, etc) and how they’re portrayed?
As you can probably tell, my biggest challenge for my thesis at the moment will be finding a topic to focus on. I have some broad/vague ideas but nothing that I really love or am particularly excited about. I want to make sure that I pick a topic I’m actually interested and invested in, because I’ve felt the difference between writing a paper about something that I just sort casually picked because it fit the topic of a class and writing a paper when I’m actually interested in the content, and the latter is so much better for not getting stuck while writing.
One thing I’d like to do but I’m not sure actually falls under the scope of what a thesis can be is write some sort of creative story having to do with myth. Maybe something like creating my own myth based on criteria from existing literature, or rewriting one/some myth(s) for a different context (ie. set in modern times). Recently something I was reading mentioned how some ancient authors wrote summaries of myths rather than telling the myth as a story, and it made me wonder if I could maybe take one of those summaries and write it out as a fully fleshed out story. Again, I’m not sure if writing a narrative would fulfill the requirements of a senior thesis, so I don’t know if this type of project would actually be something I could do, but it would be something I would strongly enjoy. I’m not sure how I would directly use sources though; they would be more tangentially connected to what I write, and I would incorporate ideas from the sources in the story rather than using direct citations and such.
I also don’t have a lot of experience finding and using secondary sources, so I would need some guidance in finding sources that are relevant for my topic and figuring out how to incorporate them into my paper. Especially for such a big project with so many sources being used for one paper, it’s much more than anything I’ve done before.
I do have a new job this semester, but I don’t expect it to interfere with my classes and workload. The amount of writing even just for this class will be a lot more than I am used to, but I should be able to keep up and get everything done that I need to. I also still haven’t fully read some of the Classical texts that I expect to possibly use for my thesis, so I will be trying to do extra reading outside of classes as well.
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