112 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present
Argues for becoming “listener-readers,” active participants in written stories in
order to comprehend the oral dimensions of works by Sherman Alexie, N. Scott
Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Luci Tapahonso, Anna Lee Walters (Pawnee/
Otoe-Missouria), Della Frank (Navajo), Lee Maracle (Salish/Cree), and Louis
Owens (Choctaw/Cherokee and Irish American).
Susan Pérez Castillo, “Postmodernism, Native American Literature, and the
Real: The Silko-Erdrich Controversy,” Massachusetts Review, 32 (1991):
285–294 (also available in the anthology edited by Purdy and Ruppert, pp.
15–22).
A careful analysis of Leslie Marmon Silko’s criticisms of Louise Erdrich’s The
Beet Queen. The article is also useful for its discussion of the relationship of Post-
modernism and Native American writing.
Eric Cheyfitz, ed., The Columbia Guide to American Indian Literatures of the United
States since 1945 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006).
Considers Native American literatures in a postcolonial context, focusing on
issues of identity, sovereignty, and land. Part 1, a long essay by Cheyfitz, deals
with American Indian literatures in the context of federal Indian law; part 2
consists of essays by other scholars on fiction, poetry, drama, nonfiction, and
autobiography.
Stuart Cochran, “The Ethnic Implications of Stories, Spirits, and the Land in
Native American Pueblo and Aztlán Writing,” MELUS, 20 (Summer 1995):
69–91.
Discusses the relationship to land and the conception of a spirit world in the writ-
ing of Native American authors Leslie Marmon Silko, Simon J. Ortiz, and Jimmy
Santíago Baca (Apache and Chicano) and the Chicano writer Rudolfo Anaya.
James H. Cox, Muting White Noise: Native American and European American Novel
Traditions, American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series, volume
51 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006).
Excellent close readings of works by Gerald Vizenor, Thomas King, and Sher-
man Alexie, demonstrating how they resist and revise the colonialist ideas that
native peoples were conquered and then disappeared from history. Attempting to
avoid imposing European American methodologies and philosophies, Cox works
through the lens established by native critics to offer “red readings” of American
classics such as Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851).
Kathleen M. Donovan, Feminist Readings of Native American Literature (Tucson:
University of Arizona Press, 1998).
Looks at Native American literature and feminist literary theory as areas with
many common concerns, including the question “who in a society can speak, and
under what circumstances?” Among the authors whose works are discussed are N.
Scott Momaday, Joy Harjo, and Paula Gunn Allen.
Kenneth Lincoln, Indi’n Humor: Bicultural Play in Native America (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1993).