The Invention of Native American Literature

by Parker, Robert Dale

• ISBN13: 9780801440670
• ISBN10: 080144067X
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-01-01
• Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr

Summary

In an original, widely researched, and accessibly written book, Robert Dale Parker helps redefine the study of Native American literature by focusing on issues of gender and literary form. Among the writers Parker highlights are Thomas King, John Joseph Mathews, D'Arcy McNickle, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Ray A. Young Bear, some of whom have previously received little scholarly attention. Parker proposes a new history of Native American literature by reinterpreting its concerns with poetry, orality, and Indian notions of authority. He also addresses representations of Indian masculinity, uncovering Native literature's recurring fascination with restless young men who have nothing to do, or who suspect or feel pressured to believe that they have nothing to do. The Invention of Native American Literature reads Native writing through a wide variety of shifting historical contexts. In its commitment to historicizing Native writing and identity, Parker's work parallels developments in scholarship on other minority literatures and is sure to provoke controversy.

Author Biography

Robert Dale Parker is Professor of English at the University of Illinois

Table of Contents

Preface	vii
Tradition, Invention, and Aesthetics in Native American Literature and Literary Criticism	1	(18)
Nothing to Do: John Joseph Mathews's Sundown and Restless Young Indian Men	19	(32)
Who Shot the Sheriff: Storytelling, Indian Identity, and the Marketplace of Masculinity in D'Arcy McNickle's The Surrounded	51	(29)
Text, Lines, and Videotape: Reinventing Oral Stories as Written Poems	80	(21)
The Existential Surfboard and the Dream of Balance, or ``To be there, no authority to anything'': The Poetry of Ray A. Young Bear	101	(27)
The Reinvention of Restless Young Men: Storytelling and Poetry in Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony and Thomas King's Medicine River	128	(40)
Material Choices: American Fictions and the Post-canon	168	(20)
Appendix: Legs, Sex, Orgies, Speed, and Alcohol, After Strange Gods: John Joseph Mathews's Lost Generation Letter	188	(7)
Notes	195	(20)
Works Cited	215	(24)
Index	239