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The romantic perception of the American Southwest as a wild and dangerous frontier where heroic settlers prove their endurance has often responded to a common human desire to escape from the pressures of civilization and experience an “authentic” relationship with nature. This idealized notion about life in the Southwest, however, has contributed the subjugation of the indigenous populations and the natural world while helping rationalize the conquest of both. In Myth and Environment in Recent Southwestern Literature, Theda Wrede brings contemporary Southwestern American literature under the microscope to examine the ways in which the mythic narrative has influenced attitudes toward the land in the region. Focusing on popular novels by Corrmac McCarthy, Barbara Kingsolver, Leslie Marmon Silko, and Denise Chávez, Wrede explores the psychology behind the myth and discusses the ways in which the four authors deploy the mythic narrative, interrogate its validity, and offer visions for alternative modes of inhabiting the Southwest. In combining ideas from a culturally sensitive ecofeminist theory, psychoanalysis, postcolonial studies, and literary studies, the study offers an innovative conceptual framework for discussions about environmental responsibility in the twenty-first century. Finally, it also encourages its readers to partake in the process of mythogenesis by imagining “sustainable” narratives to help rescue the promise of the Southwest for the new millennium.
Southwestern American Indian Literature: In the Classroom and Beyond addresses several challenges that teaching Southwestern American Indian literature presents, and suggests innovative ways of teaching the material. Drawing on the author's experiences teaching literature - both in the classroom and in the canyons of the Southwest - the book covers works ranging from the famous (Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony) to the underappreciated (George Webb's A Pima Remembers). One chapter discusses teaching Sherman Alexie's Smoke Signals along with Silko's Yellow Woman as world literature; another functions as a guide to organizing a travel seminar that will enable students to experience American Indian literature and culture in potentially life-changing ways. This book provides a practical approach to the teaching of Southwestern American Indian literature without simplifying its inherent challenges.
The picturesque village of Rudge-in-the-Vale dozed in the summer sunshine. Along its narrow High Street the only signs of life visible were a cat stropping its backbone against the Jubilee Watering Trough, some flies doing deep-breathing exercises on the hot window sills, and a little group of serious thinkers who, propped up against the wall of the Carmody Arms, were waiting for that establishment to open. At no time is there ever much doing in Rudge's main thoroughfare, but the hour at which a stranger, entering it, is least likely to suffer the illusion that he has strayed into Broadway, Piccadilly, or the Rue de Rivoli is at two o'clock on a warm afternoon in July. You will find Rudge-in-the-Vale, if you search carefully, in that pleasant section of rural England where the gray stone of Gloucestershire gives place to Worcestershire's old red brick. Quiet, in fact, almost unconscious, it nestles beside the tiny river Skirme and lets the world go by, somnolently content with its Norman church, its eleven public-houses, its Pop.—to quote the Automobile Guide—of 3,541, and its only effort in the direction of modern progress, the emporium of Chas. Bywater, Chemist. Chas. Bywater is a live wire. He takes no afternoon siesta, but works while others sleep. Rudge as a whole is inclined after luncheon to go into the back room, put a handkerchief over its face and take things easy for a bit. But not Chas. Bywater. At the moment at which this story begins he was all bustle and activity, and had just finished selling to Colonel Meredith Wyvern a bottle of Brophy's Paramount Elixir (said to be good for gnat bites). Having concluded his purchase, Colonel Wyvern would have preferred to leave, but Mr. Bywater was a man who liked to sweeten trade with pleasant conversation. Moreover, this was the first time the Colonel had been inside his shop since that sensational affair up at the Hall two weeks ago, and Chas. Bywater, who held the unofficial position of chief gossip monger to the village, was aching to get to the bottom of that. With the bare outline of the story he was, of course, familiar. Rudge Hall, seat of the Carmody family for so many generations, contained in its fine old park a number of trees which had been planted somewhere about the reign of Queen Elizabeth. This meant that every now and then one of them would be found to have become a wobbly menace to the passer-by, so that experts had to be sent for to reduce it with a charge of dynamite to a harmless stump. Well, two weeks ago, it seems, they had blown up one of the Hall's Elizabethan oaks and as near as a toucher, Rudge learned, had blown up Colonel Wyvern and Mr. Carmody with it. The two friends had come walking by just as the expert set fire to the train and had had a very narrow escape. Thus far the story was common property in the village, and had been discussed nightly in the eleven tap-rooms of its eleven public-houses. But Chas. Bywater, with his trained nose for news and that sixth sense which had so often enabled him to ferret out the story behind the story when things happen in the upper world of the nobility and gentry, could not help feeling that there was more in it than this. He decided to give his customer the opportunity of confiding in him.
Culture-to-culture encounters between "natives" and "aliens" have gone on for centuries in the American Southwest—among American Indian tribes, between American Indians and Euro-Americans, and even, according to some, between humans and extraterrestrials at Roswell, New Mexico. Drawing on a wide range of cultural productions including novels, films, paintings, comic strips, and historical studies, this groundbreaking book explores the Southwest as both a real and a culturally constructed site of migration and encounter, in which the very identities of "alien" and "native" shift with each act of travel. Eric Anderson pursues his inquiry through an unprecedented range of cultural texts. These include the Roswell spacecraft myths, Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead, Wendy Rose's poetry, the outlaw narratives of Billy the Kid, Apache autobiographies by Geronimo and Jason Betzinez, paintings by Georgia O'Keeffe, New West history by Patricia Nelson Limerick, Frank Norris' McTeague, Mary Austin's The Land of Little Rain, Sarah Winnemucca's Life Among the Piutes, Willa Cather's The Professor's House, George Herriman's modernist comic strip Krazy Kat, and A. A. Carr's Navajo-vampire novel Eye Killers.
This book studies Native American and Chicano/a writers of the American Southwest as a coherent cultural group with common features and distinct efforts to deal with and to resist the dominant Euro-American culture.
This guide book is a bibliography of books about the American West by various authors, compiled by the literary critic J. Franck Dobie. The list is subdivided along themes associated with the different aspects of life in the West such as Native American culture, Spanish influences, French influences, Texas Rangers, Missionaries, Women pioneers and Mountain men culture, among others. Each aspect is preceded by a brief discussion of the topic before the list of books themed on the subject.
By analyzing ways in which indigenous cultures described the American Southwest, David Teague persuasively argues against the destructive approach that Americans currently take to the region. Included are Native American legends and Spanish and Hispanic literature. As he traces ideas about the desert, Teague shows how literature and art represent the Southwest as a place to be sustained rather than transformed. 14 illustrations.