For our Anthology Project, we will be creating our own American Literature anthology. I am asking each student to act as an editor, choosing authors and texts for future “students.” The project holds a significant weight in the course (25%) and so I expect the level of work to correlate.
Include a “Note from the Editor” (that’s you) defending how you grouped your anthology. I expect you to take into consideration the gender, race, geographic heritage, writing style, time period, linguistic heritage, and themes of your authors and texts. You should consider placement of your texts by one of these modes. (It is not necessary to arrange your authors chronologically.) However you arrange your authors/texts, you must explain your rationale. Consider unit titles.
Include a table of contents. Page numbers are not required.
Each anthology should have a minimum of 10 authors included. Only 2 may be authors we read, watched, or discussed this term. (See the course calendar.) Each author must be “American” in some way and the works you include in the project MUST be published after 1865.
For each author included, an INTRODUCTION should explain why the author was chosen for the anthology. Your reader should understand how this author speaks to the American experience. I would suggest background information be included, and all sources should be reliable ones. (Use NCLIVE for databases. PASSWORD: branmissSchool:Coastal Carolina community college) Remember, authors need not have been born in America or lived in America, but they generally did at least one or the other. How does this author exemplify “American literature”?
For each author included, the project should include the actual texts you believe future “students” should read. At least one text per author is required. For time’s sake, I recommend poems, short stories, and excerpts from longer novels/plays. Part of your grade will be the “look” of the anthology, so if you decide to print these texts from online or copy them from a textbook, you should make them free of hyperlinks, ads, and odd fonts. Project Gutenberg (www.gutenberg.org) and Academy of American Poets (www.poets.org) are acceptable websites to utilize.
The texts should demonstrate at least three genres (poetry, play, short story, letter, novel, manifesto, graphic art, autobiography, satire, speech, science fiction, memoir, music, etc.)
Also for each INTRODUCTION, you should include a written rationale for the texts you included. Publication information is required. This should include at least one properly cited quotation from the text. (Think of your Reading Response question 4 as an example.) How does this text exemplify “American literature”? If your included text is an excerpt, why did you choose these pages?
You should have a Works Cited page including where you found all author background information, all included literary texts, and all visual materials. This should be at the end of your project.
Authors will be Ernest Hemmingway,Walt Whitman,Wallace Stevens,Gertrude Stein,Amy Lowell, Hilda doolittle,W.B Yeats,James joyce,D.H Lawrence,W.H Auden