Native American Fiction: A User's Manual [Paperback]

David Treuer (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 22, 2006

An entirely new approach to reading, understanding, and enjoying Native American fiction

This book has been written with the narrow conviction that if Native American literature is worth thinking about at all, it is worth thinking about as literature. The vast majority of thought that has been poured out onto Native American literature has puddled, for the most part, on how the texts are positioned in relation to history or culture.

Rather than create a comprehensive cultural and historical genealogy for Native American literature, David Treuer investigates a selection of the most important Native American novels and, with a novelist's eye and a critic's mind, examines the intricate process of understanding literature on its own terms.

Native American Fiction: A User's Manual is speculative, witty, engaging, and written for the inquisitive reader. These essays--on Sherman Alexie, Forrest Carter, James Fenimore Cooper, Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, and James Welch--are rallying cries for the need to read literature as literature and, ultimately, reassert the importance and primacy of the word.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

A noted Ojibwa author and professor of creative writing, Treuer makes the case for critiquing Native American fiction purely as literature, ignoring the author's identity, and thus the cultural context in which it is written. In assessing Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine, Treuer delves into the function of symbol and symbolic language in the novel, marveling at Erdrich's ability to work in two modes, naturalistic and symbolic, thus bridging the physical and metaphysical worlds. In the same vein, he claims that James Welch's Fools Crow should be appreciated as a "delicate web being spun for us, not with the strands of culture but with the silk of language." And Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony succeeds not because of the author's "authenticity" but because of her exceptional ability to juxtapose myth and metaphor. Treuer asks that novels by Native Americans be afforded their status as literature, not cultural artifacts, an argument bound to impact Native American literature programs. (See p.29 for a review of Treuer's new novel, The Translation of Dr Apelles.) Deborah Donovan
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review

"[This] book is likely to become the manifesto of a new generation of Native American writers and critics and will be of interest to readers of literature anywhere." --Werner Sollors

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Graywolf Press (August 22, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 155597452X
• ISBN-13: 978-1555974527
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #101,294 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #14 in Books > Literature & Fiction > United States > Native American

More About the Author

David Treuer is Ojibwe from the Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota. He grew up on Leech Lake and left to attend Princeton University where he worked with Paul Muldoon, Joanna Scott, and Toni Morrison. He published his first novel, LITTLE, when he was twenty-four. Treuer is the recipient of the Pushcart Prize, and his work has been named an editor's pick by the Washington Post, Time Out, and City Pages. His essays and reviews have appeared in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Esquire, Slate.com, and The Washington Post.

He also earned his PhD in anthropology and teaches literature and creative writing at The University of Southern California. He divides his time between LA and The Leech Lake Reservation.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Rethinking Native American "fiction", September 27, 2008

By 

L. Smith "ake ayuta" (Missoula, MT) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Native American Fiction: A User's Manual (Paperback)

David Treuer, Ojibway academic and literary critic, offers a truly thought-provoking and edgy foundation of work in this book that challenges the critical reader of Native American fiction to closer inquiry and new understandings. Treuer provides commentary that is fresh, engaging, sophisticated, deeply intellectual, and at times laugh out loud hilarious in the true spirit of Indian humor. Treuer examines the work and popular interpretations of Sherman Alexie, Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, and James Welch in a way that sometimes makes the reader do a double take, reflect, process, and then return to Treuer's criticism armed with new insight.

With the rush of college and high school educators to strip bookstore shelves of the most recent Sherman Alexie novel, this book emerges on the horizon of Native American literary criticism at a very crucial time. Although Alexie is loved by all, both Native and non-Native readers, there is a growing concern amongst Native intellectuals regarding the near cultish fascination with Alexie's work, work that is often thematized around poverty, alcoholism, violence, and despair; common themes perpetuating the more widely believed stereotype. Treuer asserts that when it comes to reading Native American fiction, there is no "suspension of belief." Everything that Americans have come to know about Indians is shaped from birth by the media and literature. As a result, we are pre-equipped to interpret what we read through the dominant narrative and its prescribed imagery. Thus, the interpretive emphasis unintentially fixates on the word "Native" rather than "fiction," and when it comes to American Indians, fiction sustains the American reality: the stereotype remains unchanged. To be entertained denotes immediate gratification, critical thinking does not. American education does not teach us to question why the fictional Indian or the Indian of the American imagination is so much more compelling than the diverse and living Indian reality. Treuer calls this kind of knowledge, "A form of knowingness based on nothing."

No reader of Native American fiction should read another Native authored novel without first having given some thought and attention to Treuer's "user's manual." This work is revolutionary and integral to the elimination of racism as well as to the advancement of cultural awareness. For Native peoples, this work adds to the intellectual underpinnings of sovereignty. For non-Native readers, these insights create a new and critical genre of knowledge that carries with it an obligation of literary accountability.