Native American Literature

Native American Literature Native American Literature considers a selection of post-war novels by Native American writers, including well known, canonical works such as Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, as well as lesser known but equally enjoyable texts, such as Janet Campbell Hale’s The Jailing of Cecelia Capture and Linda Hogan’s Solar Storms. Believing in the possibility of communicating across cultural boundaries, Native American Literature offers a series of readings that focus on the act of understanding imaginatively texts by Native American and mixed- blood authors that address and educate a global readership. The book offers introductions to major novels, such as Paula Gunn Allen’s The Woman Who Owned the Shadows, Silko’s Ceremony and Linda Hogan’s Power, based on strategies of close, attentive reading. Having demonstrated the principle of imaginative, empathetic reading by the general reader, Helen May Dennis builds on these initial readings to explore in more detail the impressive range of narrative strategies employed in this body of works. Her final chapter, on the novels of Louise Erdrich, uses narratology as a tool for analysis. In so doing, she explores Erdrich’s sophisticated blend of oral storytelling traditions with aspects of modernist writing, and her remarkable construction of a novel cycle that relates a fictionalized version of Ojibwe history of the late twentieth century. This book interweaves questions of narratology with a wide-ranging discussion of the themes of felicitous and infelicitous spaces. The author concentrates on the different representations of cultural spaces, on themes of displacement and homelessness, and on the inscription of mixed-blood identity that internalizes the trope of the conflictual frontier zone. In addition, this study dwells on the fragility and power of individual and cultural memory as it is depicted in these novels. The book demonstrates that a judicious mix of imaginative and informed acts of interpretation permit the non-Indian reader to achieve spatialized readings of these novels, i.e. readings that read text in context and in depth. Throughout, the author enacts a practice of cross-cultural reading, which employs a diversity of strategies to respond appropriately to this burgeoning canon of Native American literature. Helen May Dennis is Senior Lecturer in North American Literature in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. She has published on Elizabeth Bishop, Willa Cather, H.D., Ezra Pound, Adrienne Rich, medieval Provençal poetry, gender in American literature and culture, and North American women writers. Routledge Transnational Perspectives on American Literature Edited by Susan Castillo University of Glasgow In an age of globalization, it has become increasingly difficult to characterize the United States as culturally and linguistically homogenous and imperme- able to influences from beyond its territorial borders. This series seeks to provide more cosmopolitan and transnational perspectives on American literature, by offering: ● in-depth analyses of American writers and writing literature by internationally based scholars; ● critical studies that foster awareness of the ways in which American writing engages with writers and cultures north and south of its territorial boundaries, as well as with the writers and cultures across the Atlantic and Pacific. 1. New Woman Hybridities Femininity, feminism, and international consumer culture, 1880–1930 Edited by Ann Heilmann and Margaret Beetham 2. Don DeLillo The possibility of fiction Peter Boxall 3. Toni Morrison’s Beloved Possible worlds Justine Tally 4. Fictions of the Black Atlantic in American Foundational Literature Gesa Mackenthun 5. Mexican American Literature Elizabeth Jacobs 6. Native American Literature Towards a spatialized reading Helen May Dennis Native American Literature Towards a spatialized reading Helen May Dennis First published 2007 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 2007 Helen May Dennis All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-96822-0 Master e-book ISBN ISBN10: 0–415–39702–2 (hbk) ISBN10: 0–203–96822–0 (ebk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–39702–5 (hbk) ISBN13: 978–0–203–96822–2 (ebk) In memoriam Harold Noel Dennis 6 April 1914–26 September 2005 Remember you used to make rugs. I say as his fingers stray towards the dry itch of eczema. Don’t scratch. Just rub. I say, then take his fingers in my hand and gently file the nails. It always calms him, so I leave one hand for later. A month later his ashes scratch and dry my cupped hands. Contents Acknowledgements xi Introduction 1 1 Preliminaries: felicitous spaces, infelicitous places and eulogized space 6 Introduction 6 Mad women and attics 8 We start musing on primitiveness 10 Nestling up ever closer to meaning 14 Conclusion 16 2 Tribal feminism after modernism: Paula Gunn Allen, The Woman Who Owned the Shadows, 1983 18 Introduction 18 Once for each of the directions 20 Composition is the difference 21 The Fall 24 Conclusion 27 3 Ephanie’s case 28 Against adverse forces 28 Infelicitous places 31 Under the guidance of Spider Woman 34 A room of one’s own 36 Conclusion 39 viii Contents 4 Narrative as ritual: Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony, 1977 40 Introduction 40 Narratives within narratives 42 Traditional myth and ritual 45 Navajo sand painting 49 Conclusion 55 5 The world of story in the writings of Leslie Marmon Silko and Linda Hogan 57 Dwelling/being in the landscape 57 Ceremony: ‘That boy needs a medicine man’ 62 6 Telling testimony: Linda Hogan, Power, 1998 70 How can there be two truths that contradict each other? 70 A world cracked open 74 7 Narratives of healing: Linda Hogan, Solar Storms, 1995 and Power, 1998 79 Introduction 79 Figures of the ‘In between’ 80 Frozen watchfulness and attachment disorders 81 Generations of abuse 84 Ghost Dance as paradigm for narrative recovery 87 Conclusion 88 8 Lighting out for the territory: Janet Campbell Hale, The Jailing of Cecelia Capture, 1985 90 Introduction 90 Resisting the ‘homing-in’ plot 94 Narrative and textual strategies in The Jailing of Cecelia Capture 97 Conclusion 102 9 Autodiegetic narration: Betty Louise Bell, Faces in the Moon, 1994 103 Introduction 103 ‘Raised on the voices of women’ 105 Narrative and textual strategies in Faces in the Moon 109 Ghosts Dance: textual rituals of ‘membering’ 113 Conclusion 117 Contents ix 10 Homing in: revisiting the paradigm 118 Introduction 118 Frank Waters’ The Man Who Killed the Deer 119 The absence of the real in the ruins of tribal representations 131 11 Indian ‘homing’ as healing ceremony 135 Introduction 135 Thick description 137 The third space of hybridity 143 12 Homing in: transforming the paradigm 146 ‘I have learned to inhabit a hybrid, unpapered, Choctaw- Cherokee-Welsh-Irish-Cajun mixed space in between’ 146 Home, a bad joke 148 Kimo Sabe! Que no sabe? 155 13 Narrative authority in the Ozhibi’ganan novels 159 Introduction 159 Mixed-blood narratives 160 Telling histories 163 Narration, narrators and narratees 164 Characterization 165 Focalization 166 Narrators and narratees 169 Analepsis and prolepsis 170 Delays and gaps 172 Implied author and implied reader 176 Conclusion 177 Conclusion 178 Appendix I Ceremony: chart of narrative structure 182 Appendix II Chart of The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse (2001): narrative and textual strategies 185 Notes 196 Works cited 207 Select bibliography 218 Index 230 Acknowledgements Extracts from The Woman Who Owned the Shadows by Paula Gunn Allen are reproduced with permission. Copyright © 1983 by Paula Gunn Allen. Used by permission of Aunt Lute Books. Extracts from Faces in the Moon: A Novel by Betty Louise Bell are reproduced by permission. Copyright © 1994 by Betty Louise Bell. Used by permission of the University of Oklahoma Press. Extracts from The Jailing of Cecelia Capture by Janet Campbell Hale are reproduced with permission. Copyright © 1985 by Janet Campbell Hale. Thanks to Janet Campbell Hale for permission to quote from her work and for her wonderful, witty email correspondence. Extracts from Power by Linda Hogan are reproduced with permission. Copyright © 1988 by Linda Hogan. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Extracts from Dark River: A Novel by Louis Owens are reproduced by permission. Copyright © 1999 by Louis Owens. Used by permission of the University of Oklahoma Press. Extracts from Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko are reproduced with permission. Copyright © 1977 by Leslie Silko. Used by permission of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Extracts from Ceremony by Leslie Marmon Silko are reproduced in e-book format with permission. Copyright © 1977 by Leslie Silko. Used by permission of The Wylie Agency. Thanks to MELUS, The Journal of The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States for permission to reproduce material from pages 2–3 of A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff’s ‘Ritual and Renewal: Keres Traditions in the Short Fiction of Leslie Silko’ (MELUS 5.4 (1978): 2–17).

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