Make your reservation today American Literature and Culture through the Native American Imaginary

This new seminar will attempt to offer an alternative approach to a literary historical/cultural survey. Instead of a traditional survey of American literary history from the WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) perspective, we will view this history as far as possible transculturally or at least contrastively. For example, we will compare John Smith's popular account of the English arrival in Virginia with the Native Americans' uncomfortable tribal version, published in written form in 2007, just in time for the 400th anniversary of settling the New World in Jamestown (current cultural historians point out that -unsettling- might be a more suitable word). This tribal version with its graphic description of the captivity of Pocahontas also intends to provide a counter-discourse to the first colonial best-seller, Mary Rowlandson's narrative about her Indian captivity. Clearly, the power structures and resentments which arose 400 years ago have not yet vanished. The early Indigenous oral creation myths and stories of the origins of their social system can be productively compared to the Puritan sermons called -jeremiads- which have deeply influenced the creation of America narrative of national identity (even presidential Inaugural addresses can be considered a modern form of jeremiad). Scholars believe that the Iroquoian confederacy was a model of Federalism for the drafters of the American Constitution. Furthermore, the Native American trickster figure does not simply coincidentally resemble the -con man- of the early 19th-century American tall tale While the -American Literary Renaissance- was in full bloom with such canonical authors as Emerson, Poe, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Stowe, Melville, Alcott, and Whitman, Indian leaders like Chief Seattle and Chief Joseph were holding eloquent speeches with rhetorical sophistication in the face of the brutal decimation of the Native American tribes. Indeed, Thoreau, called the -first Green- or even the -first hippie-, was influenced by Native American attitudes, as was in fact the whole first American philosophy movement ,-Trancendentalism-, developed by Thoreau and Emerson's circle. The flowering of Native American literature since the 1970s has including writing back to the mainstream literary and cultural tradition, often with clever and complex humor. Osage poet Carter Revard's protest poem -Song of Ourself- (1996), for instance, responds directly to Whitman's famous poem -Song of Myself- (1855). The title of this seminar has been taken from a humorous text by Native American Anna M. Sewell, who satirically points out that Americans have always idealized and appropriated Indian culture, simultaneously trying to contain it, keep it under tight control: -To discover your Inner Indian, just pick up your phone and dial 1-900-WANNABE. Make your reservation today.- Adopting a term from Ojibwa humorist Drew Taylor, we will attempt to free the -alterNative- imagination in gaining a double-voiced view of American literary/cultural history. I have chosen a recent novel by the prize-winning author from the Ojibwe tribe (with a German father), Louise Erdrich: Four Souls (2004/2005). The Harper paperback edition is available for a good price via amazon.de, but you may purchase any edition of the novel. It combines many Native American traditions and historical cross-cultural encounters in the story of an Ojibwe woman who -seeks restitution from the lumber baron who has stripped her reservation- (back cover). The other literature for the course will be contained in the semester reader. You do NOT need to read these excerpts and stories, as well as historical accounts and theory, before the seminar begins in November; the reader will be available then. If you want to inform yourself in general about Native American history, that would be commendable! Anglistik - Sprachpraxis Universität Siegen WiSe 2010/11 Ph.D. Waegner Cathy Ph.D