HUM 112 – Modernity and Tradition
Dr. Yıldız
Midterm Assignment
Due Date: November 21, 2025 – 11:00pm
For this assignment, you are given two prompts below. Answer both prompts.
Please upload your type-written essay as instructed within the Moodle.
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You may/should use relevant excerpts from the rest of the text. ough not encouraged, you may also
use external references. In both cases, please use a coherent and sufficient system for citations (MLA is
recommended).
Your essay should be written in Times New Roman (12pt, double-spaced) on a page with normal
margins on each side (1 inch / ~2.5cm).
1.
Assessment Criteria
Details are as follows:
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10 Points –– Depth of Analysis – Does your essay offer a thoughtful, detailed interpretation?
Does your essay provide sufficient evidence for your interpretation?
3 Points –– Clarity & Organization – Is your argument well-structured and coherent?
2 Points –– Writing Quality – Is your prose clear, polished, and precise?
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HUM 112 – Modernity and Tradition
Dr. Yıldız
Prompt I
Consider the excerpt below within an approximately 800-word essay.
In your introduction, briefly state the position of this excerpt within the overall plot of the play before
you outline the plan of your essay. You may form your essay according to what you find interesting in
the passage, though your essay should provide an answer to the following questions at the very least:
1. What does the excerpt reveal about various characters in Hamlet ?
2. How do these revelations contribute to the broader themes of the play?
---CLAUDIUS
O, for two special reasons,
Which may to you, perhaps, seem much unsinewed,
And yet to me they are strong. e Queen his mother
Lives almost by his looks; and for myself––
My virtue or my plague, be it either which––
She’s so conjunctive to my life and soul
at, as the star moves not but in his sphere,
I could not but by her. e other motive,
Why to a public count I might not go,
Is the great love the general gender bear him,
Who, dipping all his faults in their affection,
Would, like the spring that turneth wood to stone,
Convert his guilts to graces; so that my arrows,
Too slightly timbered for so loud a wind,
Would have reverted to my bow again,
And not where I had aimed them.
(Shakespeare, Hamlet 312-13; Scene 4.7)
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HUM 112 – Modernity and Tradition
Dr. Yıldız
Prompt II
Consider the excerpt below within an approximately 800-word essay.
In your introduction, briefly state the position of this excerpt within the overall argument of the
Meditations before you outline the plan of your essay. You may form your essay according to what you
find interesting in the passage, though your essay should provide an answer to the following questions
at the very least:
1. How does the excerpt relate to the method that Descartes outlines in the Discourse ?
2. How does the excerpt relate to Descartes’ arguments in the Meditations ? What does Descartes
aim to achieve with such an elaboration?
3. What does Descartes argue about the faculty of imagination? More precisely, how does
grasping the wax through imagination differ from grasping it through the mind alone?
---Perhaps the wax was what I now think it is: namely that the wax itself never really was the
sweetness of the honey, nor the fragrance of the flowers, nor the whiteness, nor the shape, nor
the sound, but instead was a body that a short time ago manifested itself to me in these ways,
and now does so in other ways. But just what precisely is this thing that I thus imagine? Let us
focus our attention on this and see what remains after we have removed everything that does
not belong to the way: only that it is something extended, flexible, and mutable. But what is
it to be flexible and mutable? Is it what my imagination shows it to be? Namely, that this piece
of wax can change from a round to a square shape, or from the latter to a triangular shape?
Not at all; for I grasp that the wax is capable of innumerable changes of this sort, even though
I am incapable of running through these innumerable changes by using my imagination.
erefore this insight is not achieved by the faculty of imagination. erefore this insight is
not achieved by the faculty of imagination. What is it to be extended? Is this thing’s extension
also unknown? For it becomes greater in wax that is beginning to melt, greater in boiling wax,
and greater still as the heat is increased. And I would not judge correctly what the wax is if I
did not believe that it takes on an even greater variety of dimension than I could ever grasp
with imagination. It remains then for me to concede that I do not grasp what this wax is
through the imagination; rather, I perceive it through the mind alone.
(Descartes, Meditations 67-68; Meditation II)
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