Probably the most fascinating articles, however, are those dealing with White conceptions of Native American life and culture--especially the manner in which they, without intending to, produce what they desire to find there. His subjects are Erna and Harvey Fergusson, Witter Bynner and Charles F. Lummis and he treats them with respect while critically unraveling the assumptions, biases, and mistakes that they unwittingly bring to their interpretations of Native American culture.
Hanson, Elizabeth I. Forever There: Race and Gender in Modern Native American Fiction. New York: Peter Lang, 1989.
Oddly, despite the title of her book, Hanson does not extremely discuss the interrelated question of race and gender. Her straightforward analyses of McNickle, Silko, Paula Gunn Allen, and others proceed from central themes and relate either queries of race or gender to each. In some cases (e.g., Momaday) she discusses notions of race as produced by the characters--how they perceive, for example, Indianness in relation to White categories and pressures and in others (e.g., Erdrich) she discusses the writer's conception of the feminine and how it is expressed within the characters' behavior. The book lacks a unifying thrust but the individual (brief) chapters are typically informative and critically sharp.
Larson, Charles R. American Indian Fiction. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1978.
Velie approaches every of his authors through other literature with which, he believes, they share traits and influences. Some perspectives are expected, including Silko's reworking of Laguna legend. But others surprise, this kind of his analysis from the post-modernist slant in Vizenor's savage satires of folks on all sides of racial questions and his illuminating discussion of Welch's place inside the tradition of grimly comic ways to fiction as well as the traces of surrealism in some of his work. But the most informative discussion from the book is his analysis of Momaday's poetic prose style. He places Momaday from the broad context of European and Anglo-American variety and demonstrates the balance between traditions that Momaday achieved in his poetry and in Property Produced of Dawn.
This very good book is basically an overview of Native American literature in the second half of the twentieth century exactly where Ruppert analyses the persistent, ubiquitous theme of "mediation." His analysis is in accordance with the position exactly where modern writers discover themselves--balanced in between a couple of cultures and feeling varying degrees of psychic, social, and intellectual (dis)comfort in European and Native American (including intercultural differences inside that category) settings--both in discourse and in living. The writers' perceived role as mediators extends to both their mediation of their unique development of identity (between 2 cultural modes of identity development), and to their role as mediators between two modes of discourse that cannot otherwise communicate clearly.
Velie, Alan R. Four American Indian Literary Masters: N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko and Gerald Vizenor. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1982.
Larson's understand of 16 Native American novels centers on the significant switch from assimilation-oriented writing towards the rejection available by later novelists. In comparing earlie
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