Your primary task is to create an amalgamation and an idea book of the ideas that have been floating around this semester: about heroes, about their roles in our society, about the sacrifices they make, about their relevance in modern times.

Materials:

You will need something to put clippings or photos into; if you have a digital camera, great, if not, you can be printing out images from the Internet. You may use an old photo book or album book to suit your needs—take out what you don't want to include and keep what you'd like.

Memento/Clipping/ Image/Your Drawing

Commentary

For each memento you should write a page or two explaining why the person or event referred to is important to your understanding of heroes. Describe the person or event and any relevant or interesting circumstances. How has it contributed to your thinking about heroes? Note: You may also want to include in your album revised entries from smaller assignments.

You should create at least a minimum of 7 entries and a maximum of 10 entries. For each Commentary (about a page), you should equally have a Memento or Clipping or Photo that you are responding to—the point here is to use the image or the memory as a springboard for your ideas about heroes. Your discussion should be germane to this class, but can veer off if and when you think this is important.

Example:

You might have a clipping of Kikaida, your childhood hero. You would then do a Commentary of why that android was your childhood hero, reflecting on how that hero helped to define who you were back then or a fundamental part of your childhood.

You should also include a final commentary about what your album represents and what you have learned; in other words, if you look at all the entries in your album, you should be able to come to some generalizations about Heroes and Heroism.

Heroes Album

Satisfies the following competencies for 272 level courses:

Understanding Self & Community / Written Communication

The album is a way for you to keep a record of your developing thoughts about heroes that you share with classmates and the instructor. The idea is that you put in some sort of memento and then explain its significance for your thinking about heroes. Since English 257Q is a literature course, I want you to give special emphasis to ways in which literary products (broadly interpreted to include books, movies, plays, even song lyrics) have helped shape your thinking about heroes. More details will be provided in a separate handout.

Analysis of The Watchmen

You can do several things with this analysis:

1) Identify and assess whether or not the character, Rorscharch, is truly heroic?

2) Assess whether or not any of the core characters is a true hero—figuring out whether or not if they conform to the pathways that we have discussed in the context of heroes in this course. For example, you might assess whether or not Campbell's model on the monomyth has applicability to each character.

--Research and read through your text, attempting to take good notes or to use Post-Its to mark sections in which you can identify or critique individual characters as truly a hero, not at all a hero, or antiheroic.

--Research, if appropriate, other resource materials about heroes who have been branded as vigilantes (Batman, The Incredibles, etc.)

--Apply proper P.I.E. paragraph structures to the essay so as to outline and organize the major points consistent with the essay's thesis statement (e.g. why the selected character or characters is or is not a hero)

--Apply proper M.L.A. or A.P.A.-based quoting conventions to the essay with regards to proper quote introduction, parenthetical citation, and other quote dynamics;

--Examine quotes or images from the formal and informal text or visual-based resources so as to significantly comment on the relevance and impact of those selected images/words.

--Employ at least 5 quotes from various source materials that you find, of a textual or visual nature.

--Create a final, polished draft of at least 4-6 pages, with a List of Works Cited.

Other options:

Since it is the end of the semester, you might want different options for your last project, and let's be honest, some of you are searching for the option that is EASIEST. In my mind, however, the last project is all about what you want to focus on and what skills you have, and if you have the passion for the last project, then there is no real EASE of doing it.

If you are good at art, you might prepare a children's storybook in which you have a fully-defined hero or what you consider to be a hero. You might compare and contrast other children's folktale and storybooks to your particular chapter.

If you are adept at manga-influenced art, you might create a chapter from your upcoming manga about a hero; later, you might compare and contrast your drawn hero to already established models of manga.

If you are familiar with Western comics, you might compile a comparison between comic book characters and draw a Western-style comic book superhero of your own. Then you might compare between your drawing and the established drawings of comic book artists like A. Ross.

If you enjoy music, you might compile a list of three songs about heroes and do a lyrical analysis between the songs. You might additionally create your own song about heroism.

If you are intrigued by human psychology, you might figure out the Myers-Briggs type indicators on popular heroes and villains and identify what is the strongest type indicator for a villain and for a hero and explain why the personality type might influence such behavior.

If you enjoy theatre, you might craft a screenplay full of dialogue between a hero and a villain debating with each other about the merits and demerits of moral behavior.

If you've done a service learning project, you might adapt your end-of-service evaluation to be more in line with a discussion of heroism. You should talk to the service-learning coordinator about the topic prompt for your writeup, then talk to me about how to adapt that essay for this project.

You might review all of the characters we've discussed this semester and then compile a TOP o' the HEROES chart, explaining why which one ends up on the top of the heroes pyramid.

There are many options for what you want to do...so run um by me first.