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Ethnic Literature

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Ethnic Literature
American Literature Paper
Randy Hale
University of Phoenix
ENG.301
American Ethic Literature
Michael Cromwell
December 24, 2012

American Ethic Literature Paper
What makes American literature American?
American literature is just that American literature. American literature is stories of people lives that are based on American standards. Early American standards where based around slavery and oppression but now they are based on freedoms like freedom of speech and press. America has been through many time periods that has shaped it into the wonderful nation that we have today. True American literature is about life in the United States. This paper will create an understanding about American ethnic literature.
What is literary canon? How does literary canon relate to what is going on in society? Is traditional American literature multicultural?
Literary canon is a classification of literature that is used to describe books or literature that is considered to be important of a time period or place. For writing to become canonized, it has to become widely respected by influential literary critics, scholars, teachers, and anyone that is respected in opinions and judgments regarding literary work. A canonized piece of literature becomes very popular and is studied by students in thousand of classrooms around the world (Casey, 2009) Canonized literature reflects the norms or standards that society follows for a certain time period and location. As society changes so does the type of literature that is canonized (Casey, 2009). For example the biggest topic that people are writing about now is the so called end of the world but about one hundred years ago it was about freedom and anti slavery. In my opinion traditional American Literature is multicultural because the American population is a mixture of so many other cultures. The United States is a melting pot of cultures of the world and that is what makes the US so interesting.
Please define "ethnic



References: Casey, J. (2009). Canon Issues and Class Contexts: Teaching American Literature from a Market Perspective. Radical Teacher, (86), 18-27. Dickstein, M. (2007). Going Native: When American literature became good enough for Americans, what happened to the literary canon?. American Scholar, 76(1), 150-155. Kanellos, N. (1995). Hispanic American literature. A brief introduction and anthology. New York, NY: Addison-Wesley. Vizenor, G. (1995). Native American literature. A brief introduction and anthology. New York, NY: Addison-Wesley.

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