Q14

[eunjung.shin]

I narrowed down to C and D.

I was troubled because of Ongoing on C and Merits on D.

How do you know the passage talks about ONGOING debate? I believe it is a discussion over the influence of ind autonomy and the power of the gods with the examples of three scholars.

I understand that the passage does not point out the relative merits of interpretations.


Thanks for the help!

[ohthatpatrick]

Good question.

We can support the idea that its "ongoing" because all the verbs that relate to the critics or the general discussion are in the present tense.

The 1st sentence says that the Greek dramas "engender" considerable debate (not "engendered").

Snell argues / Barbu sugggests / Rivier thinks Snell's emphasis misrepresents / Lesky disputes both views

These are all present tense, so we can infer that this is a present debate (and, really, in the Humanities, where questions are rarely definitively settled, you can expect that every text has an ongoing debate about how to interpret it).

===other answers===

A) the author never takes a position or expresses an opinion. The three main critical viewpoints are simply presented.

B) establishing a "variety of themes" is too vague ... this passage was a series of perspectives on one specific theme, "individualism vs. divine intervention".

D) the author never takes a position or expresses an opinion, so we can't support "point out relative merits"

E) tempting wording. the passage is presenting the debate over human motivation's role in Greek tragedy. however, this answer is saying that the author wanted to show how Greek tragedy could be relevant to a separate debate. Greek tragedy IS the debate.

Good luck.

[nnn2108]

I also narrowed down to C and D, but I ended up going with D, because my reading of the passage led me to believe that the primary point of the passage was discussing the three scholars' different interpretations of Greek tragedy. My rationale was that the passage was organized by the thoughts of the respective interpretations of the three specific scholars, not by the interpretations themselves.

For example, Paragraph 1 talks about Snell's view, Paragraph 2 talks about A. Rivier's view, and Paragraph 3 talks about A. Lesky's view. If the passage, had been organized by the views, and then Snell, Rivier, and Lesky were presented as scholars holding each of those views, I think I would have more confidently picked C.

Thus, while I knew that the passage was not presenting "relative merits" of each of the interpretations, I also was confident that the assertion that the passage simply presented "aspects" of the scholarly debate was way too vague, and that it should have mentioned the the specific interpretations in some respect.

What I am thinking now is that the reason why C is correct is because lines 1-5 ("tragic dramas written in Greece during the fifth century B.C. engender considerable scholarly debate over the relative influence of individual autonomy and the power of the gods on the drama's action") essentially serve as the conclusion, and the interpretations in the following paragraphs merely serve as evidence to support that conclusion. Thus the primary purpose of the passage is supporting the conclusion made in lines 1-5, which is answer C, which states "presents aspects of an ongoing scholarly debate".

Am I on the right track here?