Word of Myth: Critical Stories in Minority American Literature Open Access
Schiff, Sarah Eden (2010)
Abstract
Abstract
Word of Myth: Critical Stories in Minority American
Literature
By Sarah Eden Schiff
Since the 1960s, African American, Native American, Asian
American, and Chicano/a
literatures have captivated the national imagination. "Word of
Myth" contends that
minority authors' pervasive use of myth has been foundational to
this boom in literary
production. Because it imposes order on the unknown and makes what
is historically
specific seem natural and timeless, myth has proven invaluable for
minority authors to
challenge master narratives while simultaneously reconstructing
marginalized ones.
Though myth is conventionally understood as a politically
conservative narrative form, I
argue that it can both conserve and liberate, sanction and qualify.
In myth, minority
writers found the means to transmit cultural values, intellectual
traditions, and silenced
histories while retaining an oppositional political
stance.
To map the ways crosscultural US literatures deploy myth, I draw
on a broad spectrum of
myth theory, from mid-century structuralists Carl Jung and Mircea
Eliade to more recent
scholars of religion and philosophy such as Paul Ricoeur and Wendy
Doniger.
Considering texts by contemporaneous authors across cultural
divides, each chapter of
my dissertation identifies formal dynamics by which US literatures
of race and ethnicity
forge symbolic space for alternate mythologies in order to confront
the leviathan of
American exceptionalism.
Because myth appears in all cultures but demands cultural
context to be understood, it
proves to be an especially useful theoretical lens for comparative
American literary
studies. By making myth a central critical category, "Word of Myth"
identifies literary
strategies used in common by authors of disparate racial
backgrounds, explains the
significance of these connections in the context of national
politics, and thereby revises
the prevailing narrative of American literary history. Rather than
a series of unconnected
movements or an assortment of multicultural tokens, post-1960s US
minority literature,
through its emplotment of alternate origin stories, has
fundamentally changed the
imagination of Americans - both how we imagine and
who we imagine Americans to be.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Introduction: Stories beyond Compare
………………………………….……………..
1
Chapter One: Mythic Syncretism and the Case for American
Citizenship ...………..... 38
Chapter Two: Power Literature and the Recovery of Essential Myths
.……………… 110
Chapter Three: Myth and Minority Feminist Revision
........…………………………..
189
Chapter Four: Monkey Myths and Critical Tricksters
….……………………………..
279
Conclusion: Looking Ahead
……………………………………………….………….
351
Works
Cited……………………………………………………………….…………...
364
About this Dissertation
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