English Essay#Final draft

Personal Myth Research Essay—Progression #3—Essay #3

Explanation and Assignment

Dr. M. Pearson

Assignment: Explore and research a personal myth from a philosophical, political, sociological, or historical perspective. Include the following in your essay:

1. Research your personal mythology, which means some issue, concept, or idea that is important to you and about which you know something but would like to discover more.

2. Find a myth that helps explain your personal mythology.

As you see, there are two parts to the essay:

(1) Describe your personal myth (issue, concept or idea), and

(2) explain the mythic connection (meant to help us see what you mean understand the personal issue).

Here is your opportunity to research your own personal mythology.

Your essay is to be ten-twelve (10-12) pages with at least four sources.

Use MLA Documentation Format and add a Works Cited page.

Use 12 font, Times New Roman or equivalent, double-spaced, and add a title.

We have been discussing the concept of myth, from the collage you made (week 1) through essays we have discussed throughout the term. These are the myths or stories we live. For this essay, choose one myth/story that makes you who you are, and write about it in a ten to twelve page essay with, at least, four sources.

Move into this realm of metaphor, image, symbol, myth, thinking about helping your reader "see" what you mean by re-telling a mythic tale or story and explaining how it relates to your own story. In addition, you may allude to or describe a movie or photograph or painting or poem or song or other artistic work. Listen to what Mircea Eliade, a twentieth century religious studies professor and author of numerous books on mythology, says "It is through symbol that man finds his way out of his particular situation and opens himself to the general and universal" (Qtd. in Myth: A Biography of Belief. Lemming 3). This is your goal: to write about a "particular situation" and then "open" the way for the all of us to experience the "general and universal."

What is your "particular" issue, idea, concept? First, describe your issue, idea, concept, then explain or connect your ideas to a myth that help us to understand, to "see" more fully. This idea should be included in your thesis. Throughout the essay, analyze your connections. Think about adding sub-section titles and visuals to your essay. Look at the examples in our readings that we have discussed in class.

As you write about your subject, find a myth that demonstrates the subject. Work the myth into your essay. Remember, I am defining myth in a broader scope that allows us to gain access into your view of the world (your thesis) by explaining the situation, by connecting it to a story either from the past (Aztec or Greek or other myth, or perhaps a religious text—Bible, Popul Vuh, Vedas, Gnostic texts, or a fable or fairy tale, etc.) or present as seen in a film, photograph(s), painting, poetry, sculpture, music as in song lyrics, scientific experiment to give vision allowing us to experience with you. Metaphor compares experience to similar image (love is described by a red heart on Valentine's Day); symbol is close to image but may have more grounding, more history (the Psyche/Eros tale contains symbols of seeds, labor, love) gathered around its wheels (to use a metaphor). Explain and argue your ideas through logical, academic language.

I wish you insight and a positive experience in your writing—so that you leave the class enjoying the experience and can more articulately express your ideas through writing. See me with ANY questions.

Due date: