“I believe we’re all invented Indians,” Anishinaabe writer and critic
Gerald Vizenor wrote in the early 1980s, cautioning against overly
romantic notions of Native American authenticity untainted by
colonialism while also emphasizing the power of literature to construct
critical fictions of “Indian-ness” that interrogate the past, present,
and future of Native American people and cultures on the North American
continent. In this course, we will take Vizenor’s statement as a
leitmotif to investigate a diverse array of literary works by Native
American writers. We will begin by studying the history of Native
literature and discussing the mechanisms through which this literature
has developed into a recognized field of writing. After this initial
engagement (which includes reading and discussing samples early Native American writing by authors such as Samson Occom and William Apess), we will conduct a series of close readings and cultural contextualizations of
prose fiction by writers such as Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko,
N. Scott Momaday, Sherman Alexie, and Tommy Orange; poetry
by Simon Ortiz, Joy
Harjo, Linda Hogan, and Wendy Rose; and drama by Tomson Highway
and Monique Mojica.
- Dozent/in: Daniel Stein