Native American Literature - Literary Criticism, Native North American Peoples - Authors & Literature
Log in to track your reading progress.
Overview
This first book-length critical analysis of the full range of novels written between 1854 and today by American Indian authors takes as its theme the search for self-discovery and cultural recovery. In his introduction, Louis Owens places the novels in context by considering their relationships to traditional American Indian oral literature as well as their differences from mainstream Euroamerican literature. In the following chapters he looks at the novels of John Rollin Ridge, Mourning Dove, John Joseph Mathews, D'Arcy McNickle, N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, Michael Dorris, and Gerald Vizenor. These authors are mixedbloods who, in their writing, try to come to terms with the marginalization both of mixed-bloods and fullbloods and of their cultures in American society. Their novels are complex and sophisticated narratives of cultural survival - and survival guides for fullbloods and mixedbloods in modern America. Rejecting the stereotypes and cliches long attached to the word Indian, they appropriate and adapt the colonizers language, English, to describe the Indian experience. These novels embody the American Indian point of view; the non-Indian is required to assume the role of "other." In his analysis Owens draws on a broad range of literary theory: myth and folklore, structuralism, modernism, poststructuralism, and, particularly, postmodernism. At the same time he argues that although recent American Indian fiction incorporates a number of significant elements often identified with postmodern writing, it contradicts the primary impulse of postmodernism. That is, instead of celebrating fragmentation, ephemerality, and chaos, these authors insist upon a cultural center that is intact and recoverable, upon immutable values and ecological truths. Other Destinies provides a new critical approach to novels by American Indians. It also offers a comprehensive introduction to the novels, helping teachers bring this important fiEditorials
Library Journal
A Choctaw-Cherokee-Irish novelist and professor of literature, Owens provides an important insider's perspective on ten Native American novelists. Beginning with the Cherokee author John Rollin Ridge, whose 1854 novel, The Life and Times of Joaquin Murieta, was the first American Indian novel to be published, and moving on to contemporary authors such as Louise Erdrich and Gerald Vizenor, Owens identifies a common theme among these writers. All ten are mixed-blood Indians exploring their search for identity in two worlds, where ``the individual who would `be' Indian rather than `play' Indian is faced with an overwhelming challenge.'' Owens shows how each author dealt with this marginalization through his or her characters, moving from Ridge's angry masquerade as a Mexican American bandit to Vizenor's celebration of ``crossbloods'' as shape-shifting tricksters mediating between two worlds. Drawing heavily on Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin's theories, Owens presents a well-written, jargon-free book on an often-ignored genre of American literature.-- Lisa A. Mitten, Univ. of Pittsburgh Lib.Booknews
A critical analysis of the full range of novels written between 1854 and today by American Indian authors. Owens places the novels in context by considering their relationships to traditional American Indian oral literaure as well as their differences from mainstream Euroamerican literature. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)Book Details
Published
October 1, 1992
Publisher
Norman : University of Oklahoma Press, [c1992]
Pages
304
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780806124230