ORIGINALITY AND AUTHENTICITY STILL AN ISSUE [303200]

CONTENTS

<Do not modify or delete the following text (which appears on gray background whan you hover your mouse over it). It will be automatically generated after you have formated your title and subtitle styles throughout the paper. [anonimizat]-hand mouse button and select Update field>

Abstract 4

Introduction 5

Chapter 1. Multiculturalism 8

1.1. Definitions 8

2.1. Multicultural Education in the United States 9

3.1. Multicultural Literature 12

4.1. Multicultural Literature for Children 13

5.1. Today’s attitude towards multiculturalism 16

6.1. Breaking Boundaries/ Derrumbando fronteras 18

Title level 1 (Alt-1) 19

7.1. SubTitle level 2 (Alt-2) 19

1.2.1. Storyline Subtitle level 3 (Alt-3) 19

REFERENCE LIST 22

Abstract

Introduction

“America is so vast that almost everything said about it is likely to be true and the opposite is probably equally true.”

(James Farrell)

America is the country which has been known as the land of opportunities for decades, a [anonimizat], a [anonimizat] a land where all the fantasies can be transformed into real life. Millions of immigrants go to United States and those who don’t go are only because they were not given the visa.

[anonimizat] a cultural mosaic. According to the U.S. Census Bureau (2013), current resident population of the US is 315,714,819. There are six officially accepted ethnic groups in the US. [anonimizat], [anonimizat], [anonimizat].

[anonimizat], and North Africa. This group also includes people who indicate their race a “White” [anonimizat], Italian, Lebanese, Arab, Moroccan, or Caucasian. White Americans are the racial majority with a rate of 72 % of the total US population with 223 million people (U.S. Census Bureau, 2010).

[anonimizat], refer to people who have their origins from any district in Africa. [anonimizat], Nigerian, and Haitian people. African Americans are the second largest minority group with a percentage of 13.6 of the total US population with 43.9 million people (U.S. Census Bureau, 2011).

[anonimizat], and Central America. This group of people maintains their lives through tribal affiliations and community attachments. Navajo, Blackfeet, Inupiat, Yup’ik, Central American Indian groups and South American Indian groups belong to this racial category (U.S. Census Bureau, 2010). American Indians comprise 6.3 million of the total US population according to 2011 demographics (U.S. Census Bureau, 2010).

[anonimizat], [anonimizat], India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, [anonimizat], and Vietnam. Asians represent a population of 18.2 million and are the second fastest growing minority group in the US (U.S. Census Bureau, 2010).

Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander is a [anonimizat], Samoa, and other Pacific Islands. Native Hawaiians had a population of 1.4 million in 2011 and have grown by 2.9 % since 2010 (Humes, Jones, & Ramirez, 2011).

Hispanic or Latino refers to the group of people who have their origins from Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, South or Central America, and Spain. Hispanics make up the 16.7 % of the total US population. Hispanic and Latinos are the most populous group in the United States, and numbered around 52 million people in 2011. In addition, they are the fastest growing ethnic group in the US. Their population has increased 3.1 % since 2010 (Humes et al., 2011).

Each category of immigrants brought more than their simple presence there, they also brought their culture, this way The United States of America became a multicultural country.

The traces of multiculturalism influenced also other aspects of the American system such as the Constitution, the scholar system or the literary world.

Chapter 1. Multiculturalism

Definitions

Encyclopedia Britannica describes multiculturalism as “the view that cultures, races, and ethnicities, particularly those of minority groups, deserve special acknowledgement of their differences within a dominant political culture.” More than that, multiculturalism seeks the inclusion of the views and contributions of diverse members of society while maintaining respect for their differences and withholding the demand for their assimilation into the dominant culture.

The Cambridge dictionary defines the term as “the belief that different cultures within a society should all be given importance” while the Oxford dictionary defines it as “the presence of, or support for the presence of, several distinct cultural or ethnic groups within a society.”

Multiculturalism is both a response to the fact of cultural pluralism in modern democracies and a way of compensating cultural groups for past exclusion, discrimination, and oppression. Most modern democracies comprise members with diverse cultural viewpoints, practices, and contributions.

Some examples of how multiculturalism has affected the social and political spheres are found in revisions of curricula, particularly in Europe and North America, and the expansion of the Western literary and other canons that began during the last quarter of the 20th century.

Curricula from the elementary to the university levels were revised and expanded to include the contributions of minority and neglected cultural groups. That revision was designed to correct what is perceived to be a falsely Eurocentric perspective that overemphasizes the contributions of white European colonial powers and underemphasizes the contributions made by indigenous people and people of color. In addition to that correction, the contributions that cultural groups have made in a variety of fields have been added to curricula to give special recognition for contributions that were previously ignored.

The establishment of African American History Month and of National Hispanic Heritage Month in the United States is an example of the movement. The addition of works by members of minority cultural groups to the canons of literary, historical, philosophical, and artistic works further reflects the desire to recognize and include multicultural contributions to the broader culture as a whole.

Multicultural Education in the United States

Education is one of the most important public issues in the U.S. It has a complicated structure, and hinges primarily on the standards determined from state to state. In other words, the federal government has an influence on educational quality and standards through education-related legislation and programs, but every state has a separate strategy plan it applies towards its educational systems (U.S. Department of Education, 2003; Yanusehvsky, 2011).

To understand what exactly multicultural education is for Americans, it is important to examine the educational history of the United States. As the early settlers of America were from Europe, they had brought a westernized model of education that meant that wealthy children had the initial access to education. Their purpose was to provide a fundamental education to their children. Ultimately, each colony differed in its manner to set up an educational system the first efforts to create a framework for American education system can be categorized as Colonial Education (Banks, 1991).

As the settlement in the U.S lands began on the Atlantic coast, three colonies initially began their educational systems. The Southern Colonies were centered in Virginia, the Middle Colonies centered in New York, and the Northern colonies centered in New England. The Colonial Education system did not have strong bonds between each colonial region, and each colony had a unique system of education (Johnson, Musial, Hall, Gollnick, & Dupuis, 2005).

As an important step in American education, as Johnson et al. (2005) states, compulsory education became a law in Massachusetts in 1852.

After the legislation of compulsory education, every child had the right to receive education, which accelerated the process of equal education according to gender.

The years after American Revolution were the enlightening for women, whose role as mother educators were given utmost attention after that time. Because of the fact that they grew up the leaders or members of the society, the movement was conducted in an attempt to raise awareness of women about world events, geography, and political concerns (Mays, 2004). Although the main purpose was not educating women merely for their personal development, this movement brought a new viewpoint in American education system.

As American Revolution’s being a milestone for women’s education, the American Civil War, which lasted between 1861 and 1865, became a milestone for black children. The tendency to educate upper class and white boys rather than slaves and the blacks was demolished as blacks struggled for equality in every aspect of their lives during the Civil War. The new federal government established after the war brought new funding, reshaped the curricula and made efforts to standardize the American education. After the war, colleges like Harvard, Yale or Princeton developed their relationships with the new government and renewed themselves to provide educational opportunity to previously ignored American citizens (Cohen, 2012. Hodges, 1998).

Providing education only for boys and efforts to ignore and exclude the students of color, girls, or students with disabilities from the system of education despite the laws created unrest in the society. Therefore, the 20th century became the highlighter of multicultural education efforts, in which African American scholars started expressing their concerns (Hilliard, 1978). The Civil Rights Movement (1955-1968) fuelled this unrest even more as African Americans, minority groups such as Mexican Americans, Indians Americans, and Asian Americans started fighting for racial desegregation. As part of this struggle, The Intergroup Education Movement was developed as a kind of act to diminish this segregation and set up a harmonious interracial learning atmosphere.

Multiculturalist scholars emphasized that multicultural education went through a painful process until the establishment of a well-accepted system for all people, which witnessed major developments and significant changes. Multicultural education is maintaining its journey to become more consolidated and widely accepted in the world, and especially in the U.S.

Multicultural Literature

There has been a great amount of discussion about the meaning of multicultural literature, but no consensus has been achieved. "Like the term 'postmodern’ Marilyn Levy (1995) observes, "'multicultural literature' seems to have taken on a life of its own, meaning different things to different people. To some, it's all inclusive, to others, it's all exclusive. To still others, it's simply confusing" (p. 11).

I will exemplify only few definitions of the phrase “multicultural literature”, definitions that in my point of view are the most representatives. Dasenbrock (1987) offers a literary definition: multicultural literature consists of literary works "that are explicitly about multicultural societies" or "are implicitly multicultural in the sense of inscribing readers from other cultures inside their own cultural dynamics" (p. 10). Multicultural works are also considered works that focus on "people of color"(Kruse and Horning, 1990, p. vii) or literature by and about people who are members of groups considered to be outside the sociopolitical mainstream of the United States (Sims Bishop, 1987, p. 69) or simply books other than those of the dominant culture (Austin and Jenkins, 1973, p. 50). Norton describes this kind of literature as being about racial or ethnic minority groups that are culturally and socially different from the white Anglo-Saxon majority in the United States, whose largely middle-class values and customs are most represented in American literature ( 1999, p. 580)

The rise of multicultural literature is a political, rather than a literary, movement. It is a movement to claim space in literature and in education for the historically marginalized social groups, rather than one to renovate the craft of literature itself. It has grown out of the civil rights movement and feminist movement in the 1960s and 1970s (Cai and Sims Bishop, 1994; Taxel,1997).

Since the day it came into existence, multicultural literature has been closely bound with the cause of multiculturalism and confronted with resistance from political conservatives.

Multicultural Literature for Children

In the United States, people of color were virtually invisible in children’s literature prior to the 1960s. When they were rendered in text, for the most part, they were stereotypically represented. The literary category of multicultural children’s literature developed out of this historical and sociopolitical context.

Charlemae Rollins, a librarian with the Chicago Public Library, compiled We Build Together, an annotated bibliography of books about African Americans. The recommended books were for elementary and high school students. The National Council of Teachers of English published the first of three editions in 1941.

Reading Ladders for Human Relations, first published in 1947, is a booklist that grew out of an American Council on Education sponsored project to find materials and techniques for improving human relations, a goal of intergroup education, with an emphasis on interracial harmony and interpersonal relations.

The ladders include: growing into self, relating to wide individual differences, interacting in groups, appreciating different cultures, and coping in a changing world. Several editions were published over a 35-year span. These booklists, used by teachers, librarians, and parents, promoted better human relations dislocated from a historical, sociopolitical context. Reading Ladders for Human Relations was largely informed by intergroup education which devotes little attention to power relations.

In 1954, the social climate after the Supreme Court desegregation ruling in Brown v. Board of Education forced mainstream publishing houses to confront the prevalence of ethnic stereotypes in children’s literature (Wader, 1997). African Americans were recruited to join the field of publishing as authors, illustrators, and editors. The New York Public Library began publishing an annual annotated bibliography, Books About Negro Life for Children. In 1963, the title was changed to The Black Experience in Children’s Books.

This bibliography was published intermittently until 1994, highlighting the expansion of multiethnic voices in children’s literature. It was not until after Nancy Larrick’s (1965) article, “The All-White World of Children’s Books,” which called national attention to this underrepresentation, that publishers took note of their practices of exclusion and stereotyping. The increase of multicultural representation in children’s literature was a direct response central to the historical and sociopolitical reality of American children’s literature.

Multicultural children’s literature as a literary category emerged in the 1960s during the Civil Rights Movement and the growing attention to multicultural education and teaching. During the late 1960s and early 1970s activists in ethnic studies, multiethnic movements, and the African American community, frustrated with the slow pace of desegregation, demanded more community control over their schools with a goal of infusion of Black history into the curriculum (Banks, 1995).

As schools responded to the African American community’s demands, groups such as Mexican Americans, Puerto Ricans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans, who also experienced institutional racism and classism, put pressure on schools for representation in the curriculum and school life as well.

According to James A. Banks (1995), it was during this time that “a rich array of books, programs, curricula, and other materials that focused on the histories and cultures of ethnic groups of color was edited, written, or reprinted”.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, several organizations and awards promoted children’s literature that reflected underrepresented cultural groups. In 1967, the Council on Interracial Books for Children was founded by a culturally diverse group of writers, librarians, teachers, and parents to advocate for anti-racist children’s literature and educational materials, and to create a forum for the sociopolitical analysis of children’s books. They sponsored a contest for “Third World Writers.” Walter Dean Myers, an African American writer, won this contest in 1968 and published his first children’s book with Parent Magazine Press, a mainstream publisher.

In the meantime, writers and illustrators of color were recognized for their work through mainstream awards: Tom Feelings became the first African American artist to win a Caldecott Honor Award in 1972. Nicholasa Mohr became the first Puerto Rican writer to win the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award in 1974. Virginia Hamilton was the first author of color to win the Newbery Medal award in 1975.

Contemporary attitudes towards multiculturalism

Recently there has been a "backlash against the multicultural movement" (Taxel, 1997, p. 417) in general literature and in multicultural literature in particular.

The group most often under attack, particularly in the Southwest and now the South, is the Latino community.

Arizona, Alabama, and Georgia have now passed their own state-specific immigration laws in reaction to what many perceive as the out-of-control number of undocumented Latinos in their states (the most recent figures put the number of undocumented Hispanics at around 12 million).

Arizona has gone even further in its attempts to stem the tide of multiculturalism by banning K-12 courses designed specifically “for” an ethnic group.

Multiculturalism is a multi-pronged phenomenon. It is not just about immigration, secure borders, or strains on a country’s social-services and educational systems. Unfortunately, because of some Islamic extremists and because of the economic crises in the United States and the EU, multiculturalism appears to be under a severe threat throughout many of the Western countries.

Adding to the problem is the drug demand in the United States that has been drawing more and more violence on the border towns between Mexico and the United States. And the drug-related violence has only exacerbated the unemployment problems on both sides of the borders.

When a culture begins to feel threatened because of conflicting values, language barriers, or economic hard times, there is a natural tendency to close ranks. And it is not unusual for those threatened societies to become more nationalistic, exclusive, and legalistic.

This is the context of the books written by Sandra Cisneros, and the problems that she faced being a Mexican-American female in the United States represent the main theme of her books.

Breaking Boundaries/ Derrumbando fronteras

Title level 1 (Alt-1)

SubTitle level 2 (Alt-2)

Storyline Subtitle level 3 (Alt-3)

Case subtitle level 3(Alt-4)

ALT—N: Normal_teza StyleThe intent of this paper has developed as a result of my reading an interview with Peter Ackroyd conducted by Suyana Onega in this interview she states –and her affirmation is confirmed by the subject of her enquiry– that Peter Ackroyd has shifted his interest from his first preoccupation, that is poetry,

—Q = Quotation consisting of only one paragraph‘to fiction and biography writing as a necessary choice of the two genres that are more appropriate for the purpose of renewing the English literary tradition.’ (Onega, “Interview Ackroyd”, 208-213).

But sometimes quoatations consist of several paragraphs and then you need to have first-line indents (retreats) and different ways of dealing with the middle paragraphs.

ALT-C,1=Citat 1 (initial) Your first paragraph will have a space before but no space after..

Alt-C,2=Citat 2 (middle) Then your middle paragraph(s) will get a style without spaces before and after.

Alt-C,3=Citat-3 (final) And your final quoatation will get space before.

Alt-F = Normal Fără retragere. Sometimes after a quotation, because you are continuing the idea before, you feel like starting a paragraph without a first-line indent.

When you quote a poem, we use a style arrangement similar to that of mulpiple-paragraph quotations:

Alt-V,1=Vers 1 (Initial) The first verse goes like this

Alt-V,2=Vers 2 (Middle) And the middle verse goes like this

Alt-V,2=Vers 2 (Middle) More middle verses then is the same, and they spill over here

Alt-V,3=Vers 3 (Final) And then the last one needs some space after

Using Suzana Onega’s assertion as a starting point, I will illustrate that Peter Ackroyd’s novels, Chatterton and Milton in America are successful attempts to reconsider the English past in terms of literature and history.

ALT-T,1=Teatru 1 (initial) Your first paragraph will have a space before but no space after..

Alt-T,2=Teatru 2 (middle) Then your middle paragraph(s) will get a style without spaces before and after.

Alt-T,3=Teatru-3 (final) And your final quoatation will get space before.

The basis of Peter Ackroyd’s poetics consists of two main tendencies: choosing as the subject of his novels figures from the English literary history and using the already written literary tradition by assimilating it and then reinstating it in a modified form. These two complementary directions are imbued with a profoundly intertextual connotation.

ALT—E = Definition EntryStandard-bearer

ALT—D = Definition 1 : one that bears a standard or banner

2 : the leader of an organization, movement, or party

REFERENCE LIST

Throughout this paper the titles of the two novels by Peter Ackroyd have been referred to by means of the following acronyms:

C = Chatteron

MA = Milton in America

<these examples are given in MLA syle>

ALT-B = BibliographyAckroyd, Peter. Chatterton. : Penguin, 1993 [Original edition Hamilton Books, 1987]. Print. <book with indication of original edition>

–Milton in America. : Sinclair-Stevenson, 1996. Print.<book by the same author>

Banville, John. Eclipse. : Picador, 2000.

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Druber, Gertrude. “Peter Ackroyd’s Many Apocryphal Faces”. Literature and History. 63.1 (1990) 91-8. Print. <article in scholarly journal>

Gorman, Jeffrey. “Just another ‘poète maudit’? Thomas Chatterton’s Life and Work”. Time Magazine, Feb. 1992: 44-55. Print. <article in monthly magazine>

Hutcheon, Linda. Politica postmodernismului [The Politics of Postmodernism]. trans. Mircea Deac. : Univers, 1997. Print.<translation of a book>

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Humes, K. R., Jones, N. A., & Ramirez, R. R. (2011). Overview of race and Hispanic origin: 2010. 2010 Census Briefs, March 2011.

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ALAN Review, 22 (3), 11-15

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Johnson, J., Musial, D., Hall, G. E., Gollnick, D. M., Dupuis, V. L. (2005). Introduction to the foundations of American education. The United States: Pearson Education, Inc.

Yanusehvsky, R. (2011). Improving education in the United States: A political paradox. The United States: Algora Publishing.

Mays, D. A. (2004). Women in early America: Struggle, survival and freedom in a Cohen, M. D. (2012). Restructuring the campus: Higher education and the American Civil War. The United States: University of Virginia Press.

new world. The United States: ABC-CLIO, Inc.

Hillard, A. G. (1978). Restructuring teacher education for multicultural imperatives. In W.A. Hunter (Ed.), Multicultural Education Through Competency-Based Teacher Education. The United States: American Association of College for Teacher Education

Hodges, D. C. (1998). Participation as dis-identification with/in a community of practice. Mind,Culture and Activity, 5(4), 272-290.

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clarification of the concept. In A. H. Dyson & C. Genishi (Eds.), The need for story:

Cultural diversity in classroom and community (pp. 57-71). Urbana, IL: National

Council of Teachers of English.

Dasenbrock. R. W. (1987). Intelligibility and meaningfulness in multicultural literature.

PMLA, 102(1), 10-19.

Kruse, G. M., and Homing, K. T., (1990). Looking into the mirror: Considerations behind

the reflections. In M. V. Lindgren (Ed.), The multicolored mirror: Cultural substance

in literature for children and young adults. Fort Atkinson, WI: Highsmith.

Sims Bishop, R. (1987). Extending multicultural understanding through children's books.

In B. E. Cullinan (Ed.), Children's literature in the reading program (pp. 60-67).

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Austin, M. C, and Jenkins, E. (1973). Promoting world understanding through

literature, K-8. Littleton, CO: Libraries Unlimited.

Larrick, Nancy. (1965). The all-White world of children’s books. Saturday Review, 48(11), 63–65.

Wader, Rose E. (1997). Milestones in children’s literature. In D. Muse (Ed.), The New Press guide to

multicultural resources for young readers (pp. 12–17). New York: The New Press.

Banks, James. (1995). Multicultural education: Historical development, dimensions, and practice. In J. A.