Personal AnthologyHonors English 12

KielSSHS

Fall 2013

• Determine a theme or motif that you believe appropriately represents a crucial part of your personality or belief system. This theme will be used as the basis for your personal anthology.

• By the scheduled due dates, you should locate items written/designed by global/British writers/composers/artists from any of the various backgrounds of your choosing that you determine properly depict this theme.

• Include a copy of these items in your anthology and follow up each with a defense/response which includes

– An explanation of how the work is linked to your theme and why you chose it

– An emphasis on any particular line/section that you feel speak to you personally

– That part of your own individualized experience or personal philosophy that responds most profoundly to the piece.

– *This reflection should constitute the greater part of your response and should provide names (even if changed), places, dates, detailed descriptions, enough specifics that the reader feels s/he is there and participating.

• For example, if you’ve chosen justice as your theme, you may decide to use an excerpt from Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, when he decides to defy social conscience and obey his own personal conscience, thus realizing a higher level of justice.

• Your defense or commentary on this piece should explain its connection with or influence on your own concept of justice. This is a suitable point to include significant quotations (“ ‘Alright then, I’ll go to hell’”) and any personal experiences that have caused you to test this concept. Note: your inclusion of your own personal experiences and thinking in relation to this selection is crucial in making this a PERSONAL anthology.

• Also, you are invited to include items of your own creation which follow the same guidelines (should clearly be linked to your central theme and should have a similar type response/defense attached).

• Those items stemming from your own creative process may fall in the genre of your choice (essay, photograph, poem, etc.) This item or an appropriate representation of it must fit in your anthology.

Items to include• Poems• Essays• Songs• Short Stories• Artwork• Quotations• Novel Excerpts• Items of special interest

Possible themes• Adventure• Chance• Change• Competition• Conflict • Connections• Tradition• Courage• Creation• Destruction• Discovery• Families• Fate • Frontiers

Design

• The anthology should be neatly and securely bound and should include– Cover

– Title page

– Dedication

– Table of Contents

– Defense/response accompanying each text or artwork

– MLA-formatted bibliography

Cover Designs

DEDICATION

Introduction

THEME

CHOICE

CATEGORIES

COVER

DESIGN

Web Page

Last, First. “Article Title.” Web Page Title. Publisher. Date Published. Web. Date Accessed. <url>.

Kiel, Pam. “The History of Pop-up Books.” A View to a Kiel. 4 March 2010. Web. 2 Dec. 2013 <www.aviewtoakiel.com>.

Artwork from the Web

• Artist’s last name, first name. “Title of work.” Medium of work. Webpage title. Publisher. Date published. Web. Date accessed.

• Picasso. “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.“ Painting. Google images. August 2004. Web. 12 December 2013.

Special Interest Item

Answers to most commonly asked questions

• Put title, artist/writer/composer at the beginning of each entry. Label the response page according to avoid confusion with the entry itself.

• No anonymous writers or artists

• An entry can reflect the opposite viewpoint of your theme and still work for you as an example of the battle you’ve faced with this topic

• Your table of contents should reflect not only the page number of your works, but their responses as well.

Literature, as in most art, allows us to lose and find ourselves at the same

time.

I ask students to indicate 3 response that they would definitely life for me to

read as I grade the Personal Anthology. Any other items I read are chosen at

random.

I do not ask for a conclusion, because what we have started here is a record of

growth and change, a door flung open to launch this journey into the self. To

conclude it suggests an end to the journey. This is a time when “closure” is a

concept to avoid.

Here is a project that evolves beyond the concept of “assignment,” that

attaches itself to the life of the writer and hitches a ride. There is no higher

praise I can offer a student than to recognize this transcendence, this

willingness to find his or her own voice, to share the intimate, to take

possession of the literature or the art and make it a part of one’s own makeup.

This is a project that links the cognitive and affective domains and reminds us

that any discipline or human effort that does not bring us back to the humane

part of ourselves has missed the point.