ENGL 541 A: Contemporary Literature

Introduction to Graduate Study in American Indian and Indigenous Literatures

This seminar offers an introduction to graduate-level study in contemporary American Indian and Indigenous literatures. Rather than take a conventional literary-historical approach (i.e., following the chronology of publication of what are considered major primary texts) or take a conventional literary-critical approach (i.e., tracking the development of what are considered major approaches to scholarship in the field), we will take a genre-based approach during our ten weeks together. Each week we will center an example from a significant genre of contemporary American Indian and Indigenous literary self-representation—works designated as nonfiction, memoir, short- and long-form poetry, the novel, and short digital film—accompanied by relevant secondary materials, including reviews, interviews, and formal scholarship. Moreover, we will focus on a group of primary texts published since 2000 (with a couple notable exceptions, such as N. Scott Momaday’s seminal essay “The Man Made of Words” from 1970 and Joy Harjo’s classic collection of poetry She Had Some Horses from the 1980s).