I envision for this course a paper of 10-15 pages, involving close reading of Petronius' text and consultation of various other primary and secondary sources. You may choose any topic relevant to the Satyricon which interests you. I list below just a few possibilities which might help"prime the pump." Please meet with me by the middle of October to discuss your choice of topic.
1. Archaeology: there are countless directions you can go here, asking what the Satyricon can tell us about physical aspects of Roman culture, and comparing what we find in Petronius with evidence from archaeological sites. A few areas which occur to me are public and private baths, Trimalchio's planned tomb as it compares with real tombs in Pompeii and elsewhere, tableware, wall painting, layout of cities and houses, hotels, shipping, and farm life (as evidenced in the reports from Trimalchio's latifundia).
2. Literary theory. Slater provides an example of how one might apply a specific theoretical approach ("reader-response" criticism in his case) to the Satyricon. If you have interest in another critical methodology, you may wish to see what it can do for our understanding of Petronius. Some schools that seem to me to have possibilities are narratology, structuralism, feminist theory, and Bakhtin's theory of the novel.
3. Satire. The question of Petronian satire has generally been approached on a very large scale. It seems to me it might be profitable to consider individual passages in more detail. Choose an episode, a series of related episodes, or part of a longer episode, and determine the satirical effect of each thing that happens or is said. I propose this as a working definition of "satire": in order to be satirical a passage must implicitly criticize something within the story which recalls or represents some element of the world in which the author lives. You may wish to use someone else's definition of satire, or your own.
4. Food. Two possibilities occur to me here. You might compare Trimalchio's fare with other evidence of Roman food, to see how typical or atypical the courses in the Cena are; or you might evaluate the role of food in the work: what does Petronius accomplish by having Trimalchio choose the foods he does?
5. Humor. Choose a section of the Satyricon which you think is funny, and explain why it is funny; or choose a section you think is not funny, and explain why it fails to amuse. You may find contemporary theories of humor useful for this.
6. Words. Pandora allows us to do wonderful studies of vocabulary with relative ease Choose some element of Petronius' vocabulary, and compare it with other Roman authors. For example, what parallels do you find elsewhere in Latin literature for Petronius' apparent use of frater to mean a male's male lover? What is Petronius' vocabulary for such areas of life as religion, commerce, morality, or politics?
7. Slavery. As we have seen, much work has been done on Petronius' freedmen. What about those who have not been freed? What can we glean from Petronius about this institution in the first century AD, and attitudes towards it?
8. History. Auerbach argued that Petronius's sense of history was vastly different from that of most moderns. Just what is the historical awareness of Petronius and/or his characters. Do they have any sense at all of historical change? What do Petronius' characters know about historical events?
9. Colors. We have noticed the significance of descriptions of color in the Cena. Consider the role of color words. How does Petronius use words for color, and what do different colors suggest about those who, for example, where brightly colored clothing?