Details

When:

Where: Resurrection Lutheran Church

Cost: $165.00 for 6 session(s)

Type: In Person

Category:

Instructor: William A. Fry , a founding member of the Learning Curve faculty, taught literature and writing at a Maryland college for more than thirty years.
William A. Fry

Contemporary Native American Authors

Also see Tucson Session

After many years of eloquent Native American oratory and non-fiction, there has been what many literary scholars consider a Native American Literary Renaissance, a flowering of novels, short fiction, poetry, drama, essays, autobiography and other forms of non-fiction. This began in the late 1960’s and continued growing through the 1970’s and to the present.

In an essay for the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature (2004), Arnold E. Sabatelli writes: “N. Scott Momaday, Ph.D., a long-time resident of Tucson and Professor of English at the University of Arizona, captured the essence of Native American literature in an address he gave entitled “The Man Made of Words” in 1970 at Princeton University:

“Storytelling is imaginative and creative in nature. It is an act by which man strives to realize his capacity for wonder, meaning and delight. It is also a process in which man invests and preserves himself in the context of ideas. Man tells stories in order to understand his experience, whatever it may be. The possibilities of storytelling are precisely those of understanding the human experience.”

Week 1: An introductory survey of some major contemporary Native American authors. We will discuss the careers of and sample works by Vine Deloria, Jr., Joy Harjo, Gerald Vizenor, and Linda Hogan.

Week 2: N. Scott Momaday (1934) Kiowa/Cherokee House Made of Dawn (1968 masterpiece novel) and selected poetry from The Angle of Geese (1974) and The Gourd Dancer (1976).

Week 3: Leslie Marmon Silko (1948) Laguna Pueblo “The Yellow Woman” (1974 short story from The Man To Send Rain Clouds) and selected poetry from Laguna Woman (1974) and Storyteller (1981)

Week 4: Louise Erdrich (1954) Chippewa “Lipsha Morrissey” and “The Red Convertible” from Love Medicine (1984) and selected poetry from Jacklight (1984)

Week 5: Luci Tapahanso (1953) Navajo “In 1984” and other selections from The Women Are Singing (1993) Other poetry selections from A Radiant Curve (2008), Simon Ortiz (1941) Acoma Pueblo “Travels in the South” and other selected poetry from Woven Stone (1992)

Week 6: Ofelia Zepeda (1952 – ) Tohono O’odham Selected poetry from Where Clouds Are Formed (2008). Selected prose selections from Ocean Power (1995), Sherman Alexie (1966) Spokane/Coeur d’ Alene, Selected poetry from The Business of Fancydancing (1992), “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven” (1993 short fiction).

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Register for Native American Literary Renaissance – Oro Valley Session

Online registration has been closed for this class. Please call (520) 777-5817 for information.