Cultures, canons, and conflicts: First-year college students' attitudes about literature.

Responding to the political and educational crises over cultural literacy, multiculturalism, and expanding the canon of literature, I present case studies of eight first-year college students and their attitudes about literature. These are students who have scored 4s or 5s on the Advanced Placement English Examination and who represent a discourse community well versed in a traditional canon of literature. In first-year composition, I offer them a multicultural curriculum, presenting contemporary Native American and Mexican American literatures in dialogue with more traditional literatures. Specifically, I examine their responses to the politics of aesthetics, setting up a contrast between canons of texts and canons of methods in Advanced Placement English and a first-year college composition course stressing multicultural literatures. I pay special attention to their "cultural literacy" and to their awareness and acceptance of cultural differences. Chapter 1 gives a background and overview of the study. Chapter 2 examines the literature on cultures and its effect on canons of literary texts and methods of teaching and responding to them. Chapter 3 describes the ethnographic methods of this study, traces the history of Advanced Placement English, and lays out the multicultural curriculum of this study. Chapter 4 is a case study of one student before, during, and after the multicultural curriculum. Chapter 5 examines the past histories--families, high schools, and Advanced Placement English--of seven other students. Chapters 6 and 7 describe the responses of these seven students to a multicultural literature curriculum. Chapter 8 reviews the findings, offering interpretations and commentary on Advanced Placement English, the Advanced Placement English Examination, cultural literacy, and multiculturalism, concluding with recommendations for curricula of the future