The Fictions of Stephen Graham Jones: A Critical Companion--(Preview: Come for the Icing, Stay for the Cake: an Introduction to the Fictions of Stephen Graham Jones) (original) (raw)
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The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature
The Journal of American Culture, 2006
Invisible, marginal, expected-these words trace the path of recognition for American Indian literature written in English since the late eighteenth century. This Companion chronicles and celebrates that trajectory by defining relevant institutional, historical, cultural, and gender contexts, by outlining the variety of genres written since the 1770s, and also by focusing on significant authors who established a place for Native literature in literary canons in the 1970s (Momaday, Silko, Welch, Ortiz, Vizenor), achieved international recognition in the 1980s (Erdrich), and performance-celebrity status in the 1990s (Harjo and Alexie). In addition to the seventeen chapters written by respected experts-Native and non-Native; American, British, and European scholars, the Companion includes bio-bibliographies of forty authors, maps, suggestions for further reading, and a timeline which details major works of Native American literature and mainstream American literature, as well as significant social, cultural, and historical events. An essential overview of this powerful literature.
Frontier Gothic: Terror and Wonder at the Frontier in American Literature
Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature, 1994
Thomas King's anthology provides a welcome collection of Canadian Na tive fiction to those already familiar with the large and diverse body of Native American literatures. Doubtless it will serve as a classroom companion to Craig Lesley's Talking Leaves: Contemporary Native American Short Stones, An Anthology. King begins the collection with the transcription of an oral story told by Harry Robinson, thus signaling his attempt to push the traditionally-held boundaries of "fiction." Also included are an excerpt from a Tomson Highway drama, Coyote stories by Peter Blue Cloud and King himself, and a selection from Basil Johnston's life history/autobiography Indian School Days. Inclusion of such selections goes a long way in challenging the boundaries of fiction estab lished by the dominant culture, boundaries that have, in the past, successfully marginalized the art of oral and transitionally literate cultures. The stories which have obvious roots in oral tradition reflect a rich body of cultural myth, but other, more consciously literary, stories also skillfully inte grate the mythic. Jeanette C. Armstrong's "This Is a Story" uses a narrative frame to present her prophetic story about the return ofKyoti. Joan Crate's "Welcome to the Real World" intercalates a contemporary story with the mythic story of Thunder, creating a paratactic juxtaposition that empowers her tale. Significant additions to the anthology are several stories not bound to, as King suggests, "the expectations conjured up by the notion of 'Indianness.' " Beth Brant, Jordan Wheeler, and Richard Green offer stories that, while they have Indian characters, are not concerned with what separates the characters from the larger, white culture, but with what connects them to the larger, human culture. With his generous sampling of mature and maturing writers, with his willingness to enlarge the idea of "fiction," and with his inclusion of Indian writers who risk writing about subjects and characters not solely "Indian," Thomas King gives us a valuable collection of some of the best Canadian Native fiction.
Complutense Journal of English Studies, 2017
's edition of The Routledge Companion to Native American Literature is an expansive and comprehensive introduction to the different and multiple contexts essential to reading the literatures of the Indigenous peoples in the United States. The volume, which is intended for any reader interested in the development of Native American literature, is instrumental in providing literary, historical, cultural, political, religious, anthropological and ethnographic context to approach and understand the different manifestations of Native American literature. This collection of more than forty essays is based on extensive research carried out by leading and international scholars and covers a wide range of topics related to identity, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, sovereignties, traditions and languages, while also exploring new perspectives and new directions for the development of the field. Madsen starts out this collection by writing an "Introduction" in which she explains what the aim of the book is, provides some background information about Native American literature and the harmful consequences of the dominant colonialist views, whilst expounding clearly and conscientiously on the complex nature of the terms used in the title of the book: "Native", "American" and "Literature". The explanations that Madsen offers for each term are certainly useful and well-grounded as she provides accurate definitions and descriptions for each word, while also drawing upon proper cultural, historical and literary contexts that help readers understand the concept and category of Native American literature. After this introductory section, the main corpus of the book is constituted by five different sections: "Identities", "Key Moments", "Sovereignties", "Traditions" and "Literary Forms". The first section of the volume covers the topic of Indigenous identity by focusing on different complex aspects and Native American literary works. To start with, the first three chapters in "Identities" are strong in dealing with the importance of developing a transnational orientation in Native American literary studies, an aspect that many scholars have recently been exploring and calling for (Madsen 2010, Barrenechea and Moertl 2013, Fitz 2013, Cox and Justice 2014). The section opens with Earl E. Fitz's "Indigenous American Literature: The Inter-American Hemispheric Perspective", a riveting essay that stresses the importance of reading Indigenous American literature comparatively and from a hemispheric perspective. Fitz's analysis of different Indigenous cultures and literary works from the Canadian Arctic to Argentina is
Iperstoria (ISSN 2281 4582), 2017
This article reflects on recent developments in the broad category of Native American Studies, as it offers a particular proposal of analysis for contemporary Native literature which is based on the palimpsest metaphor. The text first revises the dialogue of Native Studies with the Turn to Ethics, emphasizing the primary ceremonial—or transformative—motivation of Native writing, and with Trauma Studies, offering a re-mapping of the paradigm by theorizing Native American grief and its political implications when expressed in literature. It then covers several recently articulated developments of Native storytelling: the dialogues between storytelling and theories; the concept of tribalography; and the recent turn to theory in Native studies. Arguing that the future of Native American Studies will necessarily have to reach for some level of balance between difference and relation, it reflects on contemporary Native identity, best illustrated by Gerald Vizenor’s concepts of the postindian and transmotion. The author then connects all these developments to the palimpsest metaphor, arguing that its emphasis on difference and relation, which come from the simultaneous view of the palimpsestic and the palimpestuous ways of understanding the metaphor, offers a useful way to interpret contemporary Native American literatures and identity, for it conveniently addresses the double reference to survival and the threat of disintegration that Native writing is largely based on. The article then analyses Linda LeGarde Grover’s The Road Back to Sweetgrass (2014) from the palimpsestic/palimpestuous perspective, examining the textual efforts to rescue hidden or written-upon meanings, and asserting the way in which those recovered voices are brought to the surface and are simultaneously acknowledged as part of a larger whole, as engaging in dialogic relation to a series of other voices with which they coexist in tension and contradiction. The double motivation of this reading—that of recovering, digging, denouncing, and of vindicating belonging, equality, and our common humanity—is key to the understanding of Native literature as a form of activism.
Native American Fiction as a "Contact Zone": Textualising Orality in James Welch’s Fools Crow
Essays in Honour of Boris Berić's Sixty-Fifth Birthday: “What's Past Is Prologue." Ed. Gabrijela Buljan, Ljubica Matek, Biljana Oklopčić, Jasna Poljak Rehlicki, Sanja Runtić and Jadranka Zlomislić. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2020. 69–97. Print // ISBN: 978-1-5275-5507-5, 2020
The paper discusses the techniques of cultural and historical revisionism in James Welch’s novel Fools Crow (1986). It argues that even though it seemingly embraces Western representational modes, Welch’s novel integrates oral tradition into fiction by bringing to life the ancient world of Blackfeet lore, its holistic cosmology, and social values as well as its intricate tradition of rituals, storytelling, and dreaming, and thus it simultaneously both undermines dominant conventions and enacts a number of conceptual turns. The analysis examines the novel’s strategies of abrogation and appropriation in order to show that by blurring the boundary between fiction, history, and myth, it effects a resonance between the material and the spiritual immanent to the Indigenous worldview and ultimately paralyses the intention of the dominant genre. Employing Holm et al.’s Peoplehood Matrix, the paper contends that the novel’s oral subtext not only challenges and redefines the boundaries of fiction but that, by reopening the wounds of history embodied in Blackfeet collective memory, it also subverts the metanarrative of Euro-American historiography, generating both conceptual and anti-imperial translation.
Exploration of Major Trends in the Realm of Native American Fiction
Journal of Advances and Scholarly Researches in Allied Education
The Native American novels are primarily associated with representation of Indianness, culture, traditions, mythology, reservation, story-telling, identity and mixed blood and community. N. Scott Momaday's world famous novel entitled-House Made of Dawn (1968) created a revolution in the history of Native American literature by achieving the Pulitzer prize in 1969 and ushering an era of Renaissance. It was prominent critic Kenneth Lincoln who used the term Native American Renaissance on account of remarkable contribution of N.