Susan Naramore Maher | University of Minnesota, Duluth (original) (raw)

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Papers by Susan Naramore Maher

UNP - Nebraska Paperback eBooks, Sep 7, 2017

Western American Literature, 2002

Western American Literature, 1992

Childrens Literature in Education, Dec 1, 1992

The Meeting of Cultures in Scott O'Dell's Island of the Blue Dolphins and Sing Down the Moon Ralp... more The Meeting of Cultures in Scott O'Dell's Island of the Blue Dolphins and Sing Down the Moon Ralph Bauer, "Television Westerns," p. 405 1960. I turned five that year, as did the family television set, for my parents bought their first TV shortly after I, their third child, was born. Mine was a typical late-fifties-early-sixties suburban family: after dinner, all six of us made a half circle around the set and watched show after show. Though I lived in a bedroom community outside New York City, my evenings were spent in the West; for the programs that remain in my memory are predominantly Westerns: "Wyatt Earp," "Have Gun, Will Travel," "Lawman," "Wanted: Dead or Alive," "Gunsmoke," "The Rifleman," "Wagon Train," "Rawhide," and "Bonanza," not to mention after-school reruns of "The Lone Ranger," "Cisco Kid," and "Annie Oakley." The television culture I recall was informed by the western. Indeed, Ralph Bauer (1984) notes that in 1959, "the peak year of the adult Western, there were twenty-eight Westerns on the air, producing 570 hours of new footage-far more than Hollywood produced during the peak years of the 'B' Western craze." The child culture of the 1950s and 1960s was heavily influenced by television westerns-much as current: juvenile culture takes it cues from cartoons, video games, and blockbuster movies. We owned all manner of air rifles, cap guns, toy pistols and holsters, cowboy hats, cheap leather chaps, feather headdresses, raccoon caps, and bows and arrows. Frontier fantasies structured our play.

Children's Literature Association Quarterly

Children’s Literature Association Quarterly in Oakland in 1968, the Great Migration in Brooklyn a... more Children’s Literature Association Quarterly in Oakland in 1968, the Great Migration in Brooklyn as it adapts to postWorld War II convenience culture, and the Jim Crow American South” (144). In the chapter on Pixar’s film Ratatouille, the authors argue that viewers are invited “to value the subjectivity of characters that could be defined as Other,” in this case, a rat in the kitchen (124). Digging into the sociohistorical contexts of the narrative, the authors acknowledge that cuisine lies “at the core of French national identity” and that “Remy’s story strongly reflects the development of French cuisine over the last two centuries” (125). The last chapter focuses on a narrative of displacement, Inside Out and Back Again, in which the protagonist and her family flee from Vietnam and are resettled in Alabama. Thorough analysis supports the authors’ conclusion that “food serves as a prominent mediator of the clash and connection between cultures that Lai’s protagonist Há experiences throughout the novel” (178). A strength of the book is also how it constructs children and children’s literature as agents of positive social transformation and inclusion. Food brings people together and is a key ingredient (I know!) in helping children learn about diverse cultures. Histories of food in children’s literature reveal to us the multitude ways food controls and sustains us. It also reflects a society’s power structures and struggles. Taking readers from the Lake District to Oakland to Paris to the Jim Crow South, Table Lands is an excellent contribution to the scholarship of children’s literature and food studies. Sarah Minslow is assistant professor of children’s and young adult literature at California State University Los Angeles. Her teaching and research focus on holocaust, genocide, and human rights studies as it intersects with children’s literature and human rights education. Her latest publication is a co-edited volume from Routledge titled Denial: The Final Stage of Genocide?.

Western American Literature

$Research paper thumbnail of Book Review: Moving Out: A Nebraska Woman\u27s Life$

At the end of her memoir, Moving Out, Polly Spence assesses all the little ironies of her life an... more At the end of her memoir, Moving Out, Polly Spence assesses all the little ironies of her life and concludes, [each] time everything seemed just right, each time I thought I\u27d found it all-the work, the love, and the ideal way to live-something brought change to me. Change is a central motif in her narrative, reflected in a title that underscores movement and mobility, not settlement. Spence\u27s Nebraska life provides a toehold on the slippery surface of twentieth-century culture in America. The many changes in her life reflect the changeable decades from the 1920s to the 1970s in which many Americans moved from agrarian to urban lives

Western American Literature, 2001

Western American Literature, 2007

Great Plains Quarterly, 2020

Th e diminishment of the ancient North American grasslands on both sides of the forty-ninth paral... more Th e diminishment of the ancient North American grasslands on both sides of the forty-ninth parallel and the undermining of Indigenous ways of life are among the most disheartening histories of the western states and provinces. When trying to understand how such an alteration of the grasslands happened, writers and historians use words such as catastrophe, ecological holocaust, and unmitigated tragedy. In the centuries since European contact and the radical transformations of European settlement, the Great Plains of North America has endured a thorny, diffi cult, disruptive historical passage that has signifi cantly tested Indigenous communities and the grasslands biome. In this essay, I focus on non-Native late twentieth-and early twenty-fi rstcentury essayists from the Plains of Canada and the United States who are helping to shift the paradigm and defi ne restorative narrative.