Review of \u3ci\u3eMediation in Contemporary Native American Fiction\u3c/i\u3e By James Ruppert

James Ruppert discusses works by six Native American writers whom he believes mediate Indian and non-Indian world views. He argues convincingly that narratives by N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gerald Vizenor, D\u27Arcy McNickle, and Louise Erdrich are delivered from an artistic and conceptual standpoint, constantly flexible, which uses the epistemological frameworks of Native American and Western cultural traditions to illuminate and enrich each other. These texts create a dynamic that brings differing cultural codes into confluence to reinforce and recreate the structures of human life: the self, community, spirit, and the world we perceive. Often citing reader-response theorists, Ruppert is particularly interested in how the various novels he discusses manage their audience\u27s involvement in ways that potentially expand their repertoire of interpretive practices. Unlike many recent studies of American Indian literature, Ruppert\u27s book considers in some detail the responses of Native American as well as non-Native readers, the latter often- and unjustifiably-assumed to be the Indian author\u27s only audience. His remarks on the Native reader are appropriate and should alert other critics to this underdeveloped area of scholarship. Overall, Ruppert\u27s assessments of a variety of mediational texts seem well reasoned and accurate; however, he often leaves his own reader wanting closer analysis of textual passages to substantiate and fully elaborate upon his claims. Indeed, Ruppert\u27s tendency to generalize and to argue abstractly constitutes the most pervasive problem in an otherwise rich study. A kindred weakness occurs when he cites literary theorists (such as Wolfgang Iser, Mikhail Bakhtin, and Hayden White) in whose thought his arguments are too loosely grounded. For example, the reader response analysis that Ruppert conducts calls for fewer casual references to Iserian concepts and more engagement (coupled with more in-depth textual analysis) with the intricacies of Iser\u27s specific claims. (Incidentally, had Ruppert developed more of a taste for details, he might have noticed that James Welch\u27s narrator in Winter in the Blood is not, in fact, nameless, but is called Raymond at least once midway through the novel.) Overall, despite a sometimes aggravating level of generalization and a tendency toward some repetition (the result of working through the same thesis with reference to six different writers), Ruppert\u27s study is full of accurate observations and valuable insights; ultimately, it rewards reading by anyone wishing to understand how Native American story tellers in- writing attempt to reach and transform their projected audiences

A História da Alimentação: balizas historiográficas

Os M. pretenderam traçar um quadro da História da Alimentação, não como um novo ramo epistemológico da disciplina, mas como um campo em desenvolvimento de práticas e atividades especializadas, incluindo pesquisa, formação, publicações, associações, encontros acadêmicos, etc. Um breve relato das condições em que tal campo se assentou faz-se preceder de um panorama dos estudos de alimentação e temas correia tos, em geral, segundo cinco abardagens Ia biológica, a econômica, a social, a cultural e a filosófica!, assim como da identificação das contribuições mais relevantes da Antropologia, Arqueologia, Sociologia e Geografia. A fim de comentar a multiforme e volumosa bibliografia histórica, foi ela organizada segundo critérios morfológicos. A seguir, alguns tópicos importantes mereceram tratamento à parte: a fome, o alimento e o domínio religioso, as descobertas européias e a difusão mundial de alimentos, gosto e gastronomia. O artigo se encerra com um rápido balanço crítico da historiografia brasileira sobre o tema

Book Review: \u3ci\u3e The Novels of Louise Erdrich: Stories of Her People\u3c/i\u3e By Connie A. Jacobs

Jacobs offers readers abundant contextual information pertinent to a critical understanding of Erdrich\u27s novels. Her purpose is similar to Susan Scarberry-Garcia\u27s in Landmarks of Healing: A Study of House Made of Dawn (1990); both books are valuable reference tools for newcomers to their authors\u27 works and to American Indian Literature in general. This volume will be of particular benefit to teachers of introductory courses in Native American literature covering Erdrich\u27s fiction

Contemporary American Women Writers: Narrative Strategies

Ann Beattie, Annie Dillard, Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, Marge Piercy, Anne Redmon, Anne Tyler, and Alice Walker all seem to be especially concerned with narrative management. The ten essays in this book raise new and intriguing questions about the ways these leading women writers appropriate and transform generic norms and ultimately revise literary tradition to make it more inclusive of female experience, vision, and expression. The contributors to this volume discover diverse narrative strategies. Beattie, Dillard, Paley, and Redmon in divergent ways rely heavily upon narrative gaps, surfaces, and silences, often suggesting depths which are lamentably absent from modern experience or which mysteriously elude language. For Kingston and Walker, verbal assertiveness is the focus of narratives depicting the gradual empowerment of female protagonists who learn to speak themselves into existence. Ozick and Tyler disrupt conventional reader expectations of the “anti-novel” and the “family novel,” respectively. Finally, Morrison’s and Piercy’s works reveal how traditional narrative forms such as the Bildungsroman and the “soap opera” are adaptable to feminist purposes. In examining the writings of these ten important women authors, this book illuminates a significant moment in literary history when women\u27s voices are profoundly reshaping American literary tradition. Catherine Rainwater, lecturer in English at the University of Texas at Austin, is co-editor of Three Contemporary Women Novelists: Hazzard, Ozick and Redmon. William J. Scheick, professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin, is the author of a number of books, including The Half-Blood: A Cultural Symbol in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction. The essays contain a useful balance of theory and detail for both the critical and general reader; the contributors are authorities in their fields who describe complex narrative strategies in an accessible style. —Choicehttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_american_literature/1007/thumbnail.jp