Native American Literature: Towards a specialized Reading (Routledge Transnational Perspectives on American Literature)

250 Pages·2006·0.91 MB·English

by  May Dennis

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
andPower, 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