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An entertaining and enlightening proposal for a new way to read Native American literature.How can a square peg fit into a round hole? It can’t. How can a door be unlocked with a pencil? It can’t. How can Native literature be read applying conventional postmodern literary criticism? It can’t.That is Craig Womack’s argument in Red on Red. Indian communities have their own intellectual and cultural traditions that are well equipped to analyze Native literary production. These traditions should be the eyes through which the texts are viewed. To analyze a Native text with the methods currently dominant in the academy, according to the author, is like studying the stars with a magnifying ...
A study of Native literature from the perspective of national sovereignty and self-determination.
Over the course of the last twenty years, Native American and Indigenous American literary studies has experienced a dramatic shift from a critical focus on identity and authenticity to the intellectual, cultural, political, historical, and tribal nation contexts from which these Indigenous literatures emerge. The Oxford Handbook of Indigenous American Literature reflects on these changes and provides a complete overview of the current state of the field. The Handbook's forty-three essays, organized into four sections, cover oral traditions, poetry, drama, non-fiction, fiction, and other forms of Indigenous American writing from the seventeenth through the twenty-first century. Part I attend...
A project of recovery and reanimation, Lost Texts in Rhetoric and Composition foregrounds a broad range of publications that deserve renewed attention. Contributors to this volume reclaim these lost texts to reenvision the rhetorical tradition itself. Authors discussed include not only twentieth-century American compositionists but also a linguist, a poet, a philosopher, a painter, a Renaissance rhetorician, and a nineteenth-century pioneer of comics; the collection also features some less-studied works by authors who remain well known. These texts will give rise to new conversations about current ideas in rhetoric and composition. This volume contains discussion of the following authors and titles: Judah Messer Leon, The Book of the Honeycomb's Flow, Angel DeCora, Sterling Andrus Leonard, English Composition as a Social Problem, Rodolphe Töpffer, William James, Kenneth Burke, Adrienne Rich, Ann E. Berthoff, John Mohawk, "Western Peoples, Natural Peoples," William Vande Kopple, William Irmscher, Beat Not the Poor Desk, Walter J. Ong, Geneva Smitherman, Thomas Zebroski, Linda Brodkey, Craig S. Womack, Deborah Cameron, James Slevin, Marilyn Sternglass, and William E. Coles, Jr.
According to a dichotomy commonly found in studies of American Indians, some noble Native people defiantly defend their pristine indigenous traditions in honor of their ancestors, while others in weakness or greed surrender their culture and identities to white American economies and institutions. This traditionalist-versus-assimilationist divide is, Joshua B. Nelson argues, a false one. To make his case that American Indians rarely if ever conform to such simplistic identifications, Nelson considers the literature and culture of many Cherokee people. Exploring a range of linked cultural practices and beliefs through the works of Cherokee thinkers and writers from the nineteenth century to t...
This engaging collection of Native American profiles examines these individuals' unique life experiences within the larger context of U.S. history. Native Americans Today: A Biographical Dictionary focuses on the lives of contemporary Native Americans. Such treatments are rare, as most Native American biographies are historical (pre-1900) and cover familiar figures. Profiles collected here are written to be enjoyable as well as instructive, presented as examples of personal storytelling that should be savored not only for their factual content, but also for the humanity they evoke. The book spotlights Native American lives in the United States and Canada, mainly after 1900, though a few olde...
Discover the essential people, works, movements, and themes in American Indian literature. American Indian literature is a varied and vibrant collection of Indigenous artistic expression. American Indian novelists, poets, essayists, and critics have over the last four centuries asserted powerful forms of intellectual and artistic sovereignty, writing in English while building on discrete tribal oral traditions and forms of storytelling. This encyclopedia introduces readers to the key historical and contemporary figures in American Indian literature and their defining works. From the fiery sermons of Methodist minister William Apess to the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel House Made of Dawn by N....
This collectively authored volume celebrates a group of Native critics performing community in a lively, rigorous, sometimes contentious dialogue that challenges the aesthetics of individual literary representation. Janice Acoose infuses a Cree reading of Canadian Cree literature with a creative turn to Cree language; Lisa Brooks looks at eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century Native writers and discovers little-known networks among them; Tol Foster argues for a regional approach to Native studies that can include unlikely subjects such as Will Rogers; LeAnne Howe creates a fictional character, Embarrassed Grief, whose problematic authenticity opens up literary debates; Daniel Heath Justic...
Pick up a work of typical literary criticism and you know what to expect: prose that is dry, pedantic, well-meaning but tedious—slow-going and essentially humorless. But why should that be so? Why can’t more literary criticism have a political edge and be engaging and fast-paced? Why can’t it include drama, personal narrative, and even humor? Why can’t criticism become an artistic performance, rather than just a discussion of art? Art as Performance, Story as Criticism is Craig Womack’s answer to these questions. Inventive and often outrageous, the book turns traditional literary criticism on its head, rejecting distanced, purely theoretical argumentation for intimate engagement wi...
Stories Through Theories/Theories Through Stories explores the uneasy relations--often contentious, sometimes complicit--between American Indian Literature and literary theory. This collection of essays--sometimes playfully but always insistently--changes our readings of Native works and challenges our roles as intellectual guides until we step deeper into the ambiguous territories where writer, listener, reader, and critic intersect.Taken together, these essays provide compelling evidence for looking at primary Native cultures, authors, and histories as enrichments of Native literature.