Anthology Project

Your anthology must contain the following:
An Organizing Topic that you will choose as the focus of your anthology. This could be an idea (eg. the discontents of new technologies), a general or philosophical or sociological category (eg. the animal), an aesthetic concept (eg. the sublime), an identity-category (eg. MuslimAmerican), a genre or mode (eg. Gothic), a period of literary or cultural history (eg. modernism), an aesthetic orientation or style (eg. realism), etc. Most likely, the most interesting topics will be those that combine two or more of these. You will likely not be in a position to choose a topic until about a month into the class, and that’s to be expected. Deciding on a topic for your anthology will probably feel a bit like deciding on the finer points of a thesis statement: you won’t really know if something is going to work until you have started writing the paper–or in this case, started assembling and thinking about at least some of your anthology selections. Assignment #1 (below) provides detailed advice on how to get started.

A Title Page that gives the full title of your anthology, your name (Edited by _____), and the date of submission.

A Table of Contents that lists the pages for the Introduction, each excerpt, Afterword, and Works Cited.

An Introduction of 1000-1250 words in which you explain your anthology’s premise and elaborate on the significance or development of your topic within the twentieth and/or twentyfirst century. This Introduction should also give a small preview of the anthology’s contents and explain your rationale for selecting the texts you have chosen to feature. A total of FIVE excerpts of roughly 500-1000 words (each from a different primary source) that showcase some aspect of your anthology’s topic.
A minimum of THREE of these sources must be primary texts studied in class.
The remaining TWO choices are “free” in the sense that they may be taken either from primary class texts or from other texts you have read or studied.
Note that if your anthology includes texts not studied in class, these texts can be from other media (film, comics, visual art, poetry, drama, etc.). Texts from other media do not need to obey the word limit, but a rough guideline would be to include 2-3 pages of images (see examples in the Sample Anthology). ENGL 3501A Syllabus 12 Note that excerpts can contain ellipses. That is, you may extract more than one section of a single work, separating non-continuous section with ellipses (see the Jack London example in
the sample anthology).

Headnotes for each excerpt (roughly 200-300 words each) that identify the author, title of the work, year of publication, and provide any information that you deem necessary for a reader to possess in order to understand the reading. For example, since you will be providing excerpts, it will likely be necessary to provide a very brief sketch of the story’s general plot or meaning as well as any details of the story that clarify ambiguous elements of the excerpt. You will also want to briefly characterize the significance of the excerpt with respect to your anthology’s topic. See Sample Anthology for examples.
Annotations for each excerpt (3-4 notes of 2-4 sentences each) that offer interpretive guidance to readers by further specifying how key elements of the excerpt (sentences, words, images, figurative language, etc.), illustrate or complicate the excerpt’s treatment of your anthology’s theme.

An Afterword of 350-500 words in which you reflect on what your anthology demonstrates about your topic and/or why you find this topic an important one to think about.

A Works Cited list in MLA Style of all the primary and secondary sources cited in the anthology’s excerpts, Introduction, Headnotes, Annotations, and Afterword.

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