AQA - CIV3C Greek Tragedy

For a 40 marker is it generally best to structure it thematically?

how would you define "intellectual content" and the "argument management" of a tragedy

Intellectual content would be any new sense of intelligence that the audience would come away from it with right? So scenes that create a new sense of intellect in tbe audience. Argument management would be how well characters manage other arguments in the play or how well the characters stick to the "argument" (point) of the tragedy. Like the women in Medea.
I could be wrong though, do you have a set definition of it? Thats just my thoughts

no, my notes from the start of the year say we will study ... .... ... argument management and the intellectual content ... ... ... ... of the tragedies

i had assumed intellectual content was some sort of comparison between the intelligence of the different characters and argument management was something similar to what you suggested, not entirely sure

I didn't really like the paper, Antigone 10 mark wasn't bad but didn't exactly understand what you could write for the 20 mark apart from the obvious, hadn't learnt either of the 40 mark questions so it was a bit of a guess as well

I thought the Antigone section was okay but I hated the 40 markers. I did the one on forgiveness but I struggled to think of examples of it in each of the plays

Yeh that was my problem, I started writing about the context of Antigone as couldn't really thinking of what to write, I probably should have done the forgiveness one instead because I feel I could have got more for it, big problem was the time, don't have enough time to plan it or consider both options

What did you put for the 5 marker on the Antigone section? I think I wrote a couple of points about Haemon saying the citizens disagreed with him punishing Antigone but now I think about it, didn't that happen after the passage they gave us?

For section A Antigone 5 marker - i basically wrote the whole lead up cus the mark schemes are really odd in that they give marks for you telling whole story of the play it seems xD

10 marker - loads of context, Pericles, pro polis, how the myth was based on true story and the law of Athens about not burying traitors and him being a good leader blah blah

20 marker - I did nomos vs dike, polis vs oikos, state vs law of the gods, the use of stycomythia and the lead up to this moment ie. revelation of it being Antigone who is creons niece. But then I used the counter argument that the turning point was creon realising what he's done after Tiresias tellS him his child will die, and his anagnorsis

40 marker - forgiveness. I talked a lot about aristotles poetics, and the importance of catharsis, and how some plays structurally conformed, ie. Hippolytus, satisfying ending, but others didn't ie. Medea was she is seemingly forgiven by the gods with a dues ex machine for what the audience would have seen as unforgivable. Then I talked about the use of forgiveness is characterisation, so creon in Antigone when he has nobody left to forgive him, the emotive note Hippolytus ends on, Oedipus doesn't deserve forgiveness as he didn't do anything wrong it was fate. I then discussed characters that shouldn't be forgiven such as phaedra and Aphrodite.

I could've used an extra half an hour and I don't think I quoted once! Oh well, onto the Aeneid!