I Hear the Train: Reflections, Inventions, Refractions by Louis Owens


I Hear the Train: Reflections, Inventions, Refractions
Title : I Hear the Train: Reflections, Inventions, Refractions
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 0806133546
ISBN-10 : 9780806133546
Language : English
Format Type : Hardcover
Number of Pages : 282
Publication : First published October 1, 2001

In this innovative collection, Louis Owens blends autobiography, short fiction, and literary criticism to reflect on his experiences as a mixedblood Indian in America. In sophisticated prose, Owens reveals the many timbres of his voice--humor, humility,love, joy, struggle, confusion, and clarity. We join him in the fields, farms, and ranches of California. We follow his search for a lost brother and contemplate along with him old family photographs from Indian Territory and early Oklahoma. In a final section, Owens reflects on the work and theories of other writers, including Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Gerald Vizenor, Michael Dorris, and Louise Erdrich. Volume 40 in the American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series  

I Hear the Train: Reflections, Inventions, Refractions Reviews

  • Angelsea

    I love Louis Owens...I will read each and every one of his books.

  • sdw

    This book collects essays and stories by Native American literary critic and novelist Louis Owens. Most interesting to me was "Bracero Summer." I had no idea that after the Bracero Program ended "the men in Sacramento" decided to recruit black youth from the cities to take their place, calling it "an economic opportunity work program." Owen here recounts his experience working in such a program. Several of the essays detail his experience fighting fires, which I enjoyed reading. He covers a range of topics and his essays are short and engaging.

    From his essay "As If an Indian Were Really an Indian": "Its very convenient, isn't it, that so much of what we perhaps loosely term postcolonial theory today is written by real "Indians" - which such names as Chakrabarty, Chakravorty, Gandhi, Bhabba, Mohanty, and so on - so that, in writing or speaking about indigenous Native American literature, we can, if we desire, quote without ever changing noun or modifier, as if an Indian were really an Indian." This essay deals with the absence of native american literature from postcolonial theory. This is an essay I would teach.