Other Destinies : Understanding The American Indian Novel - 92 edition

Summary: This first book-length critical analysis of the full range of novels written between 1854 and today by American Indian authors takes as its theme the search for self-discovery and cultural recovery. In his introduction, Louis Owens places the novels in context by considering their relationships to traditional American Indian oral literature as well as their differences from mainstream Euroamerican literature. In the following chapters he looks at the novels of John R ...show moreollin Ridge, Mourning Dove, John Joseph Mathews, D'Arcy McNickle, N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, Louise Erdrich, Michael Dorris, and Gerald Vizenor. These authors are mixedbloods who, in their writing, try to come to terms with the marginalization both of mixedbloods and fullbloods and of their cultures in American society. Their novels are complex and sophisticated narratives of cultural survival-and survival guides for fullbloods and mixedbloods in modern America. Rejecting the stereotypes and clichés long attached to the word Indian, they appropriate and adapt the colonizer's language, English, to describe the Indian experience. These novels embody the American Indian point of view; the non-Indian is required to assume the role of "other". In his analysis Owens draws on a broad range of literary theory: myth and folklore, structuralism, modernism, poststructuralism, and, particularly, postmodernism. At the same time he argues that although recent American Indian fiction incorporates a number of significant elements often identified with postmodern writing, it contradicts the primary impulse of postmodernism. That is, instead of celebrating fragmentation, ephemerality, and chaos, these authors insist upon a cultural center that is intact and recoverable, upon immutable values and ecological truths. Other Destinies provides a new critical approach to novels by American Indians. It also offers a comprehensive introduction to the novels, helping teachers bring this important fiction to the classroom.
...show less

Edition/Copyright: 92
Cover: Paperback
Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press
Published: 09/28/1994

View Author Bio

Owens, Louis : University of California-Santa Cruz

Louis Owens, who is of Choctaw-Cherokee-Irish descent, is Professor of Literature in the University of California, Santa Cruz. The coauthor of American Indian Novelists: An Annotated Critical Bibliography, he is also the author of John Steinbeck's Re-Vision of America, The Grapes of Wrath: Trouble in the Promised Land, and a novel, The Sharpest Sight, also in the American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series.

View Review

''Louis Owens' Other Destinies is the most sustained piece of criticism on contemporary Native literature. It is both brilliant and readable, provocative and profound. If you want to know anything about contemporary Native literature, here is where you must begin.''

--Thomas King, Chair, American Indian Studies, University of Minnesota.

University of Oklahoma Press Web Site, October, 2000