Golden Discoveries: Literature of the Americas

Abstract

tion. Our administrators respect our professionalism in selecting materials and developing courses. Because Creighton is a Jesuit school, our curricula are value-based; therefore, we have had little problem with censorship of ideas or language. As a matter of fact, I am proud to say our booklist looks like the top ten in censorship. We have two junior/senior courses that investigate the identity. One is United States literature that has been updated to include more minority writers. The other is comparative literature that focuses on Asian, African, Canadian, Caribbean, and Latin American literature. In developing these courses, we found most textbooks and anthologies to be flawed. Even in the newest books, publishers include US and British literature in the world-literature books, which seems a silly duplication since most schools have separate US and British-literature courses. One recently published world-literature anthology includes two poems as its representation of Caribbean literature. Central and South America are consistently und r-represented. Some texts focus more on ancient literature and inadequately represent mode n and contemporary literature. Our solution is to work with Kinko's in building our own textbooks. Kinko's does the legal work of securing permission for using, copying, and binding the selections into books. The books, obviously, are not slick; they don't have pictures, questions, response cues, vocabulary lists, glossaries, teacher manuals, or test questions. But we are able to select the material we think will work best for our stu-