beginning of my thesis

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In American culture, the way history has been used, created, taught and projected shows the ethnocentricity that America has now and has had throughout it’s past.  An ethnocentric way of thinking is not isolated to just America, the literature of every nation implies a feeling of “us and the other” and the “us” is always superior.  What the youth learned in school projects the idea that America is “the darling of the world” and is a shining example for all of human kind.  Because of how some literature, such as Gettysburg Address, emphasizes the importance of a group, like an united nation, people rally around America and create a society-based, rooted idea of home and identity for themselves.  This idea didn’t work because the projected identity of the United States only includes the Euro-American and leaves out the other regions and races that make up the whole continent and nation of America.  This ethnocentric, linear style of thinking creates a racist and limited viewpoint that needs to be corrected if the United States as well as the America truly wants to be united.

 Because of the limited viewpoint, other countries’ literature plays with the American notion of history in such a way that the literature could be seen as a critique on Euro-American ethnocentrism.  In this paper, we will not only see how this limited view point gains it’s roots in European texts such as The Tempest we will also see the

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effect it had on American texts in the past; we will see how this societal history is questioned, how this critique is shown in writing and finally the way in which it aims to change American ethnocentrism and shape the U.S into a country that is inclusive to everyone.  Through some novels like Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, one starts to see the history of human kind when he or she looks at his or her own life story in a non linear fashion.  The end result in this shift of perception is how literature’s function in history changed.  In texts grounded in the United States such as Kushner, the writing began to take note of this critique and the writers began to write in a more global and accepting style that focused more on individual rights instead of the rights of a society.