Inspiration, Imitation, Adaptation. How would Hesiod tell the story of Genesis

Description.
Why did Sappho write lyric poems instead of essays? Why did Nina Paley create a film instead of write a manifesto about Sita and her heartbreak?

Though the works we have encountered in ACA-101 are works of fiction and therefore lies, each has its own ways of telling the truth. In this class, we’ve spent almost an entire semester in the pursuit of making thesis-driven arguments about literary works. But now we’re going to change our orientation and become creators ourselves.

Assignment.
This is a two-part assignment, one creative and one analytical:

1. The first half can take many forms, including film, fiction, drama, poetry, music, screenplay, painting or other creative genres. Your task is to create something that is inspired or adapted from an aspect of one of the works we’ve read this semester. [Use as a model Nina Paley’s Sita Sings the Blues, which is an adaptation of The Ramayana. Your work should be much less developed and much shorter than hers, however.] No matter what you do, think of the length guideline as about 4 minutes: it should take roughly this long to read, perform, watch, or explain if it is strictly a visual piece.
a. Optional approach. You may collaborate with other students from ACA-101 for part 1 (collaborating may be especially fruitful if you are planning to adapt a part of a play). You can work with an additional 1, 2 or 3 students, for a group of at most 4 students. If you choose to collaborate, you may extend your project to 10 minutes. And if you are collaborating, your part 2 should include reflections on your collaborative choices.
2. The second half is a critical analysis of your project (think of it as the DVD commentary or “artist’s statement” on your work). Here, you should articulate specifically what your goals were in creating your project and where you think the piece succeeded (and also where you might improve it). Length: ~500 words.

Requirements.
Four minutes explanation length for the creative piece (or 10 minutes if you’ve collaborated with other student(s)), and a ~500 word reflection/commentary for the criticism piece.

Process.
Not that you need them, but here are a few suggestions to get you started.
· Try for humor: parody a genre or juxtapose one of the epic situations we’ve read with a more mundane one. Maybe turn Book 1 of The Iliad into a comedy or the scene where Ishtar asks Gilgamesh to be her lover (and he turns her down) into a musical. Translate one of Clytemnestra’s speeches into the language of a manga villain. Try to draw Telemachus at the bow contest.
· Transpose one character to another text (how would Gilgamesh deal with Oedipus’ problems?), or bring together two characters together for a discussion (imagine Rama and Achilles as college roommates).
· Rewrite a text in a different genre and with a different sensibility. How would Hesiod tell the story of Genesis? Would Eve’s version of the Fall be a tragedy?
· Adapt a short scene (no more than ~100 lines) from one of the tragedies we’re reading as a play. Where would you set the play (ancient Greece, the WeWork building, Tsarist Russia)? What kind of costume choices would you make? How about blocking and staging of the characters relative to each other? If you choose this route, you might perform the scene yourselves and film it to turn in; or you could write these choices down in a script (as in, include descriptions of your setting and actors, and include cues for how actors should deliver lines--you might even change/update the lines to better fit your setting).

These are just suggestions, of course. I want you to pursue any idea you can imagine in any form you’d like. The only real requirement is to have fun, and experience the pleasure of creating a new and brilliant world.