Textual fantasies and culturality in Native American fiction: A review article of new books by Treuer and Justice
Publication Details
O'Neill, A. (2011). Textual fantasies and culturality in Native American fiction: A review article of new books by Treuer and Justice. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 13(2), 16.
Abstract
The relationship between Western scholarship and Indigenous storytelling, whether oral or written, has been and continues to be problematic. As many scholars have noted in recent years, critical theory often adds to the confusion, promoting a fraught relationship between teller, text, and reader. Not surprisingly, it has prompted outcries from Indigenous and non-Indigenous writers, readers, and scholars alike. This is why Ojibwe novelist and scholar David Treuer's Native American Fiction: A User's Manual and Cherokee novelist and critic Daniel Heath Justice's Our Fire Survives the Storm: A Cherokee Literary History make a fascinating and important study. Readers are presented with two different notions of "Native literature," each informed by a contrasting idea of what literary scholarship is and should be. Consequently, the relevance of conversive scholarly strategies, according to which literary scholarship is a form of intersubjective and transformative communication, is foregrounded.
Keywords
Peer-reviewed
Link to Publisher Version (URL)
http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1748&context=clcweb
