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The American Dream
The American Dream' is a phrase that has become an essential component of the American experience, a phrase that, once entered into the national lexicon, has come to define our nation's identity, underlying nearly every aspect of our lives. And since the birth of the founding document of our nation, the Declaration of Independence, the idea of 'The American Dream' has become a pervasive and frequently deconstructed theme within the canon of American literature.
American Multicultural Identity: Leslie Marmon Silko's Cross-Cultural Vision in the Atomic Age
Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness... the question of what it means to be an American is contemplated in many works of fiction and nonfiction. The editors of The American Identity examine the American character, life in the 'melting pot,' and the many facets of American identity in popular literature. Close readings of the most important works in this genre sheds a new light on the study of this wide-ranging theme.
Critical Insights: Sherman Alexie
Noticed initially as a Native American author, Sherman Alexie has since achieved a reputation as a significant figure in the American literary landscape. The essays in this volume have been chosen to address the interests and needs of a broad range of readers, from students seeking further insights to teachers who hope to deepen their understanding to scholars who wish to join a conversation among their peers. In his citation of War Dances as the winner of the PEN/Faulkner Award, poet Al Young said that the book ""taps every vein and nerve, every tissue, every issue that quickens the current blood-pulse,"" lauding Alexie for ""the caring, eye-opening beauty of this rollicking, bittersweet gem of a book."" The intention and purpose of this volume is to provide critical insights worthy of that achievement. Alexie's work is the imaginative expression of his eventful life. This volume, therefore, includes an insightful biographical sketch of Alexie which provides a guide to many of the most noteworthy incidents and circumstances of his life. The combination of controversy, compelling writing, and a dynamic personality has projected Alexie into a unique position in contemporary American culture, and his work has reached a much wider range of readers than would have been anticipated by readers of his first poems. The course of critical scrutiny that followed the publication of Alexie's books is ably assessed in an essay that reaches back to Alexie's early life to lead into the beginning of his appearance in print. It continues as he becomes a part of a visible literary landscape and then a prominent point in its topography. A continuing controversy, highlighted by Alexie's refusal to be restricted to any projection of American Indian reality other than his own, is given expression by an essay that asks, ""What right does Alexie have to share with general readers our most painful realities of poverty and social dysfunction?"" The exploration of this question is an illustration of one of the most provocative and persistent issues that Alexie's work has emphasised. Other essays explore impact of atrocities on his writing, the identity of the American Indian in modern writing and the author's broadening perspective on the human condition. Alexie's poetry receives specific attention in a number of essays. His poetry, the genre acknowledged by the author as the ""original fire"" that ignited his creative flame, is central to understanding his other work. For instance, Alexie ""modifies the English sonnet"" to negotiate ""between his cultural inheritances,"" one essayist stresses the ways Alexie restructures the sonnet to ""upset the reader's expectation of resolution and thus promote the idea that the Indian dilemma is never a matter that can be easily or hastily solved."" His contemporary critical reception is explored. The role of music in his prose is examined. Storytelling and oral traditions are investigated in his work and his work in films is discussed.
The Encyclopedia of Literary and Cultural Theory
This is the first comprehensive multi-volume encyclopedia of literary and cultural theory. Arranged in three volumes covering Literary Theory from 1900 to 1966, Literary Theory from 1966 to the present, and Cultural Theory, this encyclopedia provides accessible entries on the important concepts, theorists and trends in post-1900 literary and cultural theory. With explanations of complex terms and important theoretical concepts, and summaries of the work and ideas of key figures, it is a highly informative reference work for a multi-disciplinary readership Part of the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Literature Contains over 300 entries of 1000-7000 words written by an international cast of nearly 300 leading scholars in literary and cultural theory Provides explanations of complex terms, important theoretical concepts, and tools for critical analysis Provides summaries of the work and ideas of key figures such as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Judith Butler, and Slavoj i ek, and many more Online version provides students and researchers with 24/7 access to authoritative reference and powerful searching, browsing and cross-referencing capabilities Special introductory price available
Notable Native American Writers and Writers of the American West
Many tell the spirited tales of the American West, describing life in the North American frontier as it moved from its earliest border at the Appalachian Mountain range through Westward expansion to the Pacific coastline. Others write or speak of their rich, varied experiences as members of First People Nations. Each story takes its place in history, part of the development and narrative of America. This volume provides both an overview of and a more in-depth context to the stories of over 100 acclaimed writers. Each entry includes a comprehensive overview of each author's biography and literary career as well as a ready-reference listing of their major works in all genres. Writers in this volume include: Cormac McCarthy Black Elk Black Hawk Sherman Alexie Leslie Marmon Silko Janet Campbell Hale Paul Gunn Allen Vine Deloria James Fennimore Cooper Larry McMurtry Willa Cather Kit Carson Mark Twain Stephen Crane Louis L'Amour N. Scott Momaday Louise Erdrich James Welch Joy Harjo Charles Eastman John Joseph Mathews Linda Hogan Tommy Picoand Tommy Orange. Each essay identifies the writer's major genres, and birth and death dates and places. The volume also includes a Chronological List of Authors; Genre Index; Personages Index; Title Index; Subject Index; and dozens of photographs. Designed to introduce readers at the high school and university level to the rich world of Native Americans and the vivid literature of the American West, this title provides students with careful research and resources to further explore these rich literary traditions.
Sherman Alexie and the Absolute Truth of Double-Consciousness
Towards a Transcultural Future : Literature and Society in a Post-Colonial World
This second collection, complementing ASNEL Papers 9.1, covers a similar range of writers, topics, themes and issues, all focusing on present-day transcultural issues and their historical antecedents: TOPICS TREATED Preparing for post-apartheid in South African fiction; Maori culture and the New Historicism; Danish-New Zealand acculturation; linguistic approaches to 'void'; women's overcoming in Southern African writing; new post-apartheid approaches to literary studies; Afrikanerdom; postmodern psychoanalytic interpretations of Indian religion and identity; transcultural identity in the encounter with London: Malaysian, Nigerian, Pakistani; hypertextual postmodernism; fictionalized multiculturalism and female madness in Australian fiction; myopia and double vision in colonial Australia; Native-American fiction and poetry; Chinese-Canadian and Japanese-Canadian multiculturalism; the postcolonial city; African-American identity and postcolonial Africa; Johannesburg as locus of literary and dramatic creativity; theatre before and after apartheid; the black experience in England. WRITERS DISCUSSED Lalithambika Antherjanam; Ayi Kwei Armah; J.M. Coetzee; Tsitsi Dangarembga; Helen Darville; Lauris Edmond; Buchi Emecheta; Yvonne du Fresne; Hiromi Goto; Patricia Grace; Rodney Hall; Joy Harjo; Bessie Head; Gordon Henry Jr.; Christopher Hope; Ruth Prawer Jhabvala; Hanif Kureishi; Keri Hulme, Lee Kok Liang; Bill Manhire; Zakes Mda; Mike Nicol; Michael Ondaatje; Alan Paton; Ravinder Randhawa; Wendy Rose; Salman Rushdie; Sipho Sepamla; Atima Srivastava; Meera Syal; Marlene van Niekerk; Yvonne Vera; Fred Wah CRITICAL CONTRIBUTIONS BY Ken Arvidson; Thomas Bruckner; David Callahan; Eleonora Chiavetta; Marc Colavincenzo; Gordon Collier; John Douthwaite; Dorothy Driver; Claudia Duppe; Robert Fraser; Anne Fuchs; John Gamgee; D.C.R.A. Goonetilleke; Konrad Gross; Bernd Herzogenrath; Susanne Hilf; Clara A.B. Joseph; Jaroslav Ku nir; Chantal Kwast-Greff; M.Z. Malaba; Sigrun Meinig; Michael Meyer; Mike Nicol; Obododimma Oha; Vincent O'Sullivan; Judith Dell Panny; Mike Petry; Jochen Petzold; Norbert H. Platz; Malcolm Purkey; Stephanie Ravillon; Anne Holden Ronning; Richard Samin; Cecile Sandten; Nicole Schroder; Joseph Swann; Andre Viola; Christine Vogt-William; Bernard Wilson; Janet Wilson; Brian Worsfold. CREATIVE WRITING BY Katherine Gallagher; Peter Goldsworthy; Syd Harrex; Mike Nicol THE EDITORS: Geoffrey V. Davis and Peter H. Marsden teach at the Rhenish-Westphalian Technical University, Aachen; Benedicte Ledent and Marc Delrez teach at the University of Liege.
Trickster and Hero : Two Characters in the Oral and Written Traditions of the World
The trickster and the hero, found in so many of the world's oral traditions, are seemingly opposed but often united in one character. Trickster and Hero provides a comparative look at a rich array of world oral traditions, folktales, mythologies, and literatures--from The Odyssey, The Epic of Gilgamesh, and Beowulf to Native American and African tales. Award-winning folklorist Harold Scheub explores the "Trickster moment," the moment in the story when the tale, the teller, and the listener are transformed: we are both man and woman, god and human, hero and villain. Scheub delves into the importance of trickster mythologies and the shifting relationships between tricksters and heroes. He examines protagonists that figure centrally in a wide range of oral narrative traditions, showing that the true hero is always to some extent a trickster as well. The trickster and hero, Scheub contends, are at the core of storytelling, and all the possibilities of life are there: we are taken apart and rebuilt, dismembered and reborn, defeated and renewed.
Understanding Louise Erdrich
In Understanding Louise Erdrich, Seema Kurup offers a comprehensive analysis of this critically acclaimed Native American novelist whose work stands as a testament to the struggle of the Ojibwe people to survive colonization and contemporary reservation life. Kurup traces in Erdrich's oeuvre the theme of colonization, both historical and cultural, and its lasting effects, starting with the various novels of the Love Medicine epic, the National Book Award-winning The Round House, The Birchbark House series of children's literature, the memoirs The Blue Jays Dance and Books and Island in Ojibwe Country, and selected poetry. Kurup elucidates Erdrich's historical context, thematic concerns, and literary strategies through close readings, offering an introductory approach to Erdrich and revealing several entry points for further investigation. Kurup asserts that Erdrich's writing has emerged not out of a postcolonial identity but from the ongoing condition of colonization faced by Native Americans in the United States, which is manifested in the very real and contemporary struggle for sovereignty and basic civil rights. Exploring the ways in which Erdrich moves effortlessly from trickster humor to searing pathos and from the personal to the political, Kurup takes up the complex issues of cultural identity, assimilation, and community in Erdrich's writing. Kurup shows that Erdrich offers readers poignant and complex portraits of Native American lives in vibrant, three-dimensional, and poetic prose while simultaneously bearing witness to the abiding strength and grace of the Ojibwe people and their presence and participation in the history of the United States.
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The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature
Invisible, marginal, expected - these words trace the path of recognition for American Indian literature written in English since the late eighteenth century. This Companion chronicles and celebrates that trajectory by defining relevant institutional, historical, cultural, and gender contexts, by outlining the variety of genres written since the 1770s, and also by focusing on significant authors who established a place for Native literature in literary canons in the 1970s (Momaday, Silko, Welch, Ortiz, Vizenor), achieved international recognition in the 1980s (Erdrich), and performance-celebrity status in the 1990s (Harjo and Alexie). In addition to the seventeen chapters written by respected experts - Native and non-Native; American, British and European scholars - the Companion includes bio-bibliographies of forty authors, maps, suggestions for further reading, and a timeline which details major works of Native American literature and mainstream American literature, as well as significant social, cultural and historical events. An essential overview of this powerful literature.
Contemporary American Indian Literatures & the Oral Tradition
Because American Indian literatures are largely informed by their respective oral storytelling traditions, they may be more difficult to understand or interpret than the more text-based literatures with which most readers are familiar. In this insightful new book, Susan Berry Brill de Ram#65533;rez addresses the limitations of contemporary criticism and theory in opening up the worlds of story within American Indian literatures, proposing instead a conversive approach for reading and understanding these works. In order to fully understand American Indian literatures, Brill de Ram#65533;rez explains that the reader must become a listener-reader, an active participant in the written stories . To demonstrate this point, she explores literary works both by established Native writers such as Sherman Alexie, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Luci Tapahonso and by less-well-known writers such as Anna Lee Walters, Della Frank, Lee Maracle, and Louis Owens. Through her literary engagements with many poems, novels, and short stories, she demonstrates a new way to read and understand the diverse body of American Indian literatures. Brill de Ram#65533;rez's conversive approach interweaves two interconnected processes: co-creating the stories by participating in them as listener-readers and recognizing orally informed elements in the stories such as verbal minimalism and episodic narrative structures. Because this methodology is rooted in American Indian oral storytelling traditions, Native voices from these literary works are able to more directly inform the scholarly process than is the case in more textually based critical strategies. Through this innovative approach, Brill de Ram#65533;rez shows that literature is not a static text but an interactive and potentially transforming conversation between listener-readers, storyteller-writers, and the story characters as well. Her book furthers the discussion of how to read American Indian and other orally informed literatures with greater sensitivity to their respective cultural traditions and shows that the immediacy of the relationship between teller, story, and listener can also be experienced in the relationships between writers, literary works, and their listener-readers.
Living Nations, Living Words: An Anthology of First Peoples Poetry
A powerful, moving anthology that celebrates the breadth of Native poets writing today. Joy Harjo, the first Native poet to serve as U.S. Poet Laureate, has championed the voices of Native peoples past and present. Her signature laureate project gathers the work of contemporary Native poets into a national, fully digital map of story, sound, and space, celebrating their vital and unequivocal contributions to American poetry. This companion anthology features each poem and poet from the project--including Natalie Diaz, Ray Young Bear, Craig Santos Perez, Sherwin Bitsui, and Layli Long Soldier, among others--to offer readers a chance to hold the wealth of poems in their hands. The chosen poems reflect on the theme of place and displacement and circle the touchpoints of visibility, persistence, resistance, and acknowledgment. Each poem showcases, as Joy Harjo writes in her stirring introduction, "that heritage is a living thing, and there can be no heritage without land and the relationships that outline our kinship." In this country, poetry is rooted in the more than five hundred living indigenous nations. Living Nations, Living Words is a representative offering.
Louise Erdrich : Tracks - the Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse ; the Plague of Doves
Leading scholars critically explore three leading novels by Louise Erdrich, one of the most important and popular Native American writers working today.
Native-American Writers
Brings together the best criticism on the most widely read poets, novelists, and playwrights -- Presents complex critical portraits of the most influential writers in the English-speaking world -- from the English medievalists to contemporary writers
The Power of Story: On Truth, The Trickster, and New Fictions for a New Era
Award-winning Indigenous author Harold R. Johnson discusses the promise and potential of storytelling. Approached by an ecumenical society representing many faiths, from Judeo-Christians to fellow members of First Nations, Harold R. Johnson agreed to host a group who wanted to hear him speak about the power of storytelling. This book is the outcome of that gathering. In The Power of Story, Johnson explains the role of storytelling in every aspect of human life, from personal identity to history and the social contracts that structure our societies, and illustrates how we can direct its potential to re-create and reform not only our own lives, but the life we share. Companionable, clear-eyed, and, above all, optimistic, Johnson's message is both a dire warning and a direct invitation to each of us to imagine and create, together, the world we want to live in.
Tracks on A Page : Louise Erdrich, Her Life and Works
This book details the intersections between the personal life and exceptional writing of Louise Erdrich, perhaps the most critically and economically successful American Indian author ever. * Chronological organization takes the reader from Erdrich's childhood, through her years at Dartmouth College, her personal life, and her career as a writer
Understanding Sherman Alexie
In this first book-length examination of Native American poet, novelist, filmmaker, and short story writer Sherman Alexie, Daniel Grassian offers a comprehensive look at a writer immersed in traditional Native American, as well as mainstream American, culture. Grassian takes readers through Alexie's career, from his first collections of poetry, The Business of Fancydancing and Old Shirts and New Skins, through such novels as Reservation Blues and Indian Killer, to the recent short story collection Ten Little Indians. Grassian suggests that Alexie's oeuvre reflects his primary artistic challenge: how to write about Indians in a predominantly televisual country that distorts and complicates the importance and nature of ethnicity itself. Drawing comparisons with such established Native American writers as N. Scott Momaday and James Welch as well as with Generation X peers, Grassian presents Alexie's work as equally informed by Native American culture and generic, mainstream influences. lives of Native Americans as his art transforms the conventional tools of cultural colonization into a means of Native American empowerment. Grassian explores Alexie's ability to counteract lingering stereo-types of Native Americans, his challenges to the dominant American history, and his suspicion of the New Age movement. The picture of Alexie that emerges from Grassian's text is one of a writer who is fiercely talented, intelligent, witty, and honest, a writer committed to helping readers understand contemporary Native American lives, even if his work sometimes portrays both Native Americans and non-Natives in an unfavorable light.
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