Distribution Agreement In presenting this thesis or dissertation as a partial fulfillment of the requirements for an advanced degree from Emory University, I hereby grant to Emory University and its agents the non-exclusive license to archive, make accessible, and display my thesis or dissertation in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known, including display on the world wide web. I understand that I may select some access restrictions as part of the online submission of this thesis or dissertation. I retain all ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis or dissertation. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis or dissertation. Signature: ________________________________ _________________________ Sarah Eden Schiff Date Word of Myth: Critical Stories in Minority American Literature By Sarah Eden Schiff Doctor of Philosophy English _________________________________________________ Michael A. Elliott Advisor _________________________________________________ Michael Awkward Committee Member _________________________________________________ Barbara Ladd Committee Member _________________________________________________ Laurie L. Patton Committee Member Accepted: _________________________________________________ Lisa A. Tedesco, Ph.D. Dean of the James T. Laney School of Graduate Studies _____________________________ Date Word of Myth: Critical Stories in Minority American Literature By Sarah Eden Schiff M.A., University of Florida, 2004 B.A., Georgetown University, 2002 Advisor: Michael A. Elliott, Ph.D. An abstract of a dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the James T. Laney School of Graduate Studies of Emory University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English 2010 Abstract Word of Myth: Critical Stories in Minority American Literature By Sarah Eden Schiff Since the 1960s, African American, Native American, Asian American, and Chicano/a literatures have captivated the national imagination. “Word of Myth” contends that minority authors’ pervasive use of myth has been foundational to this boom in literary production. Because it imposes order on the unknown and makes what is historically specific seem natural and timeless, myth has proven invaluable for minority authors to challenge master narratives while simultaneously reconstructing marginalized ones. Though myth is conventionally understood as a politically conservative narrative form, I argue that it can both conserve and liberate, sanction and qualify. In myth, minority writers found the means to transmit cultural values, intellectual traditions, and silenced histories while retaining an oppositional political stance. To map the ways crosscultural US literatures deploy myth, I draw on a broad spectrum of myth theory, from mid-century structuralists Carl Jung and Mircea Eliade to more recent scholars of religion and philosophy such as Paul Ricoeur and Wendy Doniger. Considering texts by contemporaneous authors across cultural divides, each chapter of my dissertation identifies formal dynamics by which US literatures of race and ethnicity forge symbolic space for alternate mythologies in order to confront the leviathan of American exceptionalism. Because myth appears in all cultures but demands cultural context to be understood, it proves to be an especially useful theoretical lens for comparative American literary studies. By making myth a central critical category, “Word of Myth” identifies literary strategies used in common by authors of disparate racial backgrounds, explains the significance of these connections in the context of national politics, and thereby revises the prevailing narrative of American literary history. Rather than a series of unconnected movements or an assortment of multicultural tokens, post-1960s US minority literature, through its emplotment of alternate origin stories, has fundamentally changed the imagination of Americans – both how we imagine and who we imagine Americans to be. Word of Myth: Critical Stories in Minority American Literature By Sarah Eden Schiff M.A., University of Florida, 2004 B.A., Georgetown University, 2002 Advisor: Michael A. Elliott, Ph.D. A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of the James T. Laney School of Graduate Studies of Emory University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English 2010 Acknowledgments While it seems too easy to begin my acknowledgments by relating a dream, I have come to realize over the course of my research the significance of the stories that we tell to imagine ourselves. This is a dissertation about people’s dreams as they have been conveyed through myth, so I hope you will indulge me. Somewhat recently, I had a dream that I was afloat in a sea of books. This may sound like a good dream, but it was actually quite foreboding. The books were thick and heavy, and all of a sudden I was no longer floating. I was sinking – deeper and deeper into the musty, dank pages. I couldn’t catch my breath. But then a great school of fish swam through the books, gliding through the pages effortlessly. “Read,” said the school of fish, “read, and you will rise to the top.” “Well, maybe you won’t rise to the top,” a blond fish said, “but you will stop sinking.” * * * Thank you to the school of fish who kept me afloat through all the years. To Barbara Ladd, Laurie Patton, and Michael Awkward for their encouragement and enthusiasm and for meticulously working through drafts of these chapters with me. To Jennifer Brady, Elizabeth Chase, Kim Green, Shawn McCauley, Michelle Miles, Marc Muneal, and John Peck for an incredibly collegial graduate school experience and from whom I’ve learned fathoms. Many thanks go to the James T. Laney School of Graduate Studies of Emory University and the English department in particular for their support, both financial and intellectual. And to that blond fish, Michael Elliott, who wouldn’t let me sink to the bottom: You told me I could thank you when I have tenure, so until then – and ever – I’m in your debt. Finally, to my family, Mom, Dad, Hillary, Ethan, and to my husband John and my little Sydney. You are my lifesavers. Table of Contents Introduction: Stories beyond Compare ………………………………….…………….. 1 Chapter One: Mythic Syncretism and the Case for American Citizenship ...………..... 38 Chapter Two: Power Literature and the Recovery of Essential Myths .……………… 110 Chapter Three: Myth and Minority Feminist Revision ........………………………….. 189 Chapter Four: Monkey Myths and Critical Tricksters ….…………………………….. 279 Conclusion: Looking Ahead ……………………………………………….…………. 351 Works Cited……………………………………………………………….…………... 364 1 Introduction: Stories beyond Compare According to Maxine Hong Kingston, Leslie Marmon Silko and Toni Morrison are her kindred spirits, creative individuals struggling to make sense of their positions as women, as Americans, as minorities, and as writers: “It looks like Leslie Silko and Toni Morrison are doing what I’m doing too. When we’ve talked about our backgrounds in myth and storytelling, it sounds like we grew up in very similar ways” (Hoy interview 54).1 Kingston feels “an affinity” with Morrison and Silko because they all “seem to write alike” and “are living life in a more dangerous place” filled with “ceremony and memory” instead of merely postmodern textuality. Unlike those writers who are “only playing with words” (Rabinowitz interview 74), she, Morrison, and Silko evince a functional “aliveness” in their writing because they are connected to a specific “community and a tribe” (74). According to Kingston, the way that literary works spanning cultural divides can achieve political relevance is by being immersed not only in a specific place of cultural origins but also in the “dangerous place” of myth. Myth – a reputedly conservative narrative form – does more than provide a culturally specific means to make one’s writing directly impact the realm of experience. For Kingston, seeing the shared, even universal, mythic themes across cultural divides convinced her of “the connection of all people – that our myths break across all kinds of barriers” (Hornung “Discussions” 318). For this reason, she compares herself not only to the Chinese mythic heroine Fa Mu Lan in interviews (as she also does in The Woman Warrior) but also to the Pueblo mythic deity Spiderwoman (Perry interview 175, 188). Kingston’s recognition of myth as a means to ground her creative writing in a culturally 1 Silko, in turn, has come to similar conclusions; she says that Kingston and Morrison are “thinking and writing about the same sorts of things” as she is (Boos interview 143). 2 specific context to make literature politically efficacious while recognizing it as a category for crosscultural comparison inspires the questions that drive this dissertation: What role does myth play in minority American literatures, and how does myth provide a coherent and ethically responsible means to engage in comparative US literary studies? Kingston’s identification of myth as a productive tool for making her writing politically functional, for making it alive, connected and attentive to the “cultural memory” (Rabinowitz interview 74) of a specific group of people, and for simultaneously drawing cross-cultural comparisons is not unique. Whether as embedded narrative or structuring device, the persistent use of myth, especially in post-Civil Rights minority American literature, indicates myth’s invaluable role in responding