Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- May 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780226735948
- eISBN:
- 9780226736273
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226736273.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter follows Simon J. Ortiz, an Acoma Pueblo poet, critic, and professor, as he developed his introductory survey of Native American literature between 1977 and 1979 for the Ethnic Studies ...
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This chapter follows Simon J. Ortiz, an Acoma Pueblo poet, critic, and professor, as he developed his introductory survey of Native American literature between 1977 and 1979 for the Ethnic Studies program at the College of Marin in the California community college system. Before Marin, Ortiz had taught at several Native student-serving institutions, and wrote about course development and teaching in his journals. At Marin, he reckoned with how to teach Native American literature to non-Native students and with how to convey the diverse range of Native American literatures in a single-semester survey. After teaching a first version of the course—a traditional survey that moved from pre-contact oral literature through anthropologist-mediated life writing to the “renaissance of Native American literature”—Ortiz radically rewrote his syllabus. In his revised syllabus, each week triangulated traditional oral story, historical narrative, and contemporary fiction, replacing the traditional survey’s search for an authentic, pre-contact oral tradition with a vision of post-contact years as the center of Native American national literary tradition. Ortiz theorized this classroom-tested idea of a literature of survivance and continuance in his famous 1981 essay “Towards a National Indian Literature.”Less
This chapter follows Simon J. Ortiz, an Acoma Pueblo poet, critic, and professor, as he developed his introductory survey of Native American literature between 1977 and 1979 for the Ethnic Studies program at the College of Marin in the California community college system. Before Marin, Ortiz had taught at several Native student-serving institutions, and wrote about course development and teaching in his journals. At Marin, he reckoned with how to teach Native American literature to non-Native students and with how to convey the diverse range of Native American literatures in a single-semester survey. After teaching a first version of the course—a traditional survey that moved from pre-contact oral literature through anthropologist-mediated life writing to the “renaissance of Native American literature”—Ortiz radically rewrote his syllabus. In his revised syllabus, each week triangulated traditional oral story, historical narrative, and contemporary fiction, replacing the traditional survey’s search for an authentic, pre-contact oral tradition with a vision of post-contact years as the center of Native American national literary tradition. Ortiz theorized this classroom-tested idea of a literature of survivance and continuance in his famous 1981 essay “Towards a National Indian Literature.”
Arnold Krupat
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- August 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780801451386
- eISBN:
- 9780801465857
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9780801451386.003.0005
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Native American Studies
This chapter examines elegy in the “Native American Renaissance” and after, starting with the elegiac autobiographical text The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969) by N. Scott Momaday and “Prologue” from ...
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This chapter examines elegy in the “Native American Renaissance” and after, starting with the elegiac autobiographical text The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969) by N. Scott Momaday and “Prologue” from Linda Hogan's novel Solar Storms (1995). It also considers Gerald Vizenor prose elegy for a red squirrel, along with elegiac work attributed to various Native American poets such as Sherman Alexie, Jim Barnes, Kimberly Blaeser, Jimmie Durham, Lee Francis, Lance Henson, Maurice Kenny, Adrian Louis, Simon Ortiz, Carter Revard, and Ralph Salisbury. Many of these elegiac poems engage in various forms of melancholic mourning by telling the stories, reciting the names, and remembering those who have died, so that the People might live.Less
This chapter examines elegy in the “Native American Renaissance” and after, starting with the elegiac autobiographical text The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969) by N. Scott Momaday and “Prologue” from Linda Hogan's novel Solar Storms (1995). It also considers Gerald Vizenor prose elegy for a red squirrel, along with elegiac work attributed to various Native American poets such as Sherman Alexie, Jim Barnes, Kimberly Blaeser, Jimmie Durham, Lee Francis, Lance Henson, Maurice Kenny, Adrian Louis, Simon Ortiz, Carter Revard, and Ralph Salisbury. Many of these elegiac poems engage in various forms of melancholic mourning by telling the stories, reciting the names, and remembering those who have died, so that the People might live.
