The Invention of Native American Literature by Robert Dale Parker


The Invention of Native American Literature
Title : The Invention of Native American Literature
Author :
Rating :
ISBN : 0801488044
ISBN-10 : 9780801488047
Language : English
Format Type : Paperback
Number of Pages : 264
Publication : First published December 12, 2002

In an original, widely researched, and accessibly written book, Robert Dale Parker helps redefine the study of Native American literature by focusing on issues of gender and literary form. Among the writers Parker highlights are Thomas King, John Joseph Mathews, D'Arcy McNickle, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Ray A. Young Bear, some of whom have previously received little scholarly attention. Parker proposes a new history of Native American literature by reinterpreting its concerns with poetry, orality, and Indian notions of authority. He also addresses representations of Indian masculinity, uncovering Native literature's recurring fascination with restless young men who have nothing to do, or who suspect or feel pressured to believe that they have nothing to do. The Invention of Native American Literature reads Native writing through a wide variety of shifting historical contexts. In its commitment to historicizing Native writing and identity, Parker's work parallels developments in scholarship on other minority literatures and is sure to provoke controversy.

The Invention of Native American Literature Reviews

  • Hollis

    Gives a very persuasive survey of some notable Native American poems and novels from the 20th century with emphasis on the unstable nature of cultural identity in the construction of literary texts. In particular, Parker's approach to culture and literary study is clarified when he steps away from particular texts to a more general discussion for the final chapter on literary canon formations, anticanon perspectives, and his pedagogical-scholarly call to represent unrepresentativeness. I especially appreciated his note on how all potential canons expose a constructed image of America, and how even multicultural lens run the risk of approaching a variety of texts as monocultural products of an author's emphasized background. Another chapter worth highlighting is 6, which reads the function and (un)sacredness of poetry/oral storytelling in Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony (as well as Thomas King's Medicine River, which I haven't read yet).