Onward in literature! Sincerely, Michael Strickland
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Here is an excerpt from the introduction to 'Yellow Woman': Leslie Marmon Silko (Women Writers : Texts and Contexts) by Melody Graulich of Utah State University:
"Within one story there are many other stories coming together," Leslie Silko has said of the cultural traditions of her tribe, the Laguna Pueblo Indians. To borrow an image from another culture, "Yellow Woman is a Chinese box: story within story within story. The Yellow Woman stories the narrator has heard construct her sense of self and her actions. In turn, she makes them on her own. When she decides at the stories end that she will tell her family a story about how "some Navajo had kidnapped" her, she claims the cultural inheritance the story explores. She becomes the storyteller, passing on the stories in her own voice. As the stories have shaped her, so will she shape them; they must evolve to respond to her particular experience and point of view. The story "Yellow Woman," yet another telling of her abduction by a mountain spirit, constructed from many Yellow Woman stories, becomes only the most recent telling in an ongoing tradition. |
"He watched her face, and her eyes never shifted; they were with him while she moved ... He was afraid of being lost, so he repeated trail marks to himself ... this is my voice calling out to her. He ... felt the warmth close around him like river sand, softly giving way under foot, then closing firmly around the ankle in cloudy warm water. But he did not get lost, and he smiled at her as she held his hips and pulled him closer. He let the motion carry him, and he could feel the momentum within, at first almost imperceptible, gathering in his belly. When it came, it was the edge of a steep riverbank crumbling under the downpour until suddenly it all broke loose and collapsed into itself." - Leslie Marmon SilkoMelody Graulich is a Professor of English and serves as the American Studies Graduate Director at Utah State University. She is editor of the journal Western American Literature and teaches a variety of courses focusing on interdisciplinary approaches to the literature and culture of the US West, including graduate courses such as Introduction to the Theory and Practice of American Studies and Seminar in the American West, and undergraduate courses such as Western American Literature and US Nature Writers. Particular interests include gender studies, visual culture, US art and photography, film, borderlands. She is a member of the Western Literature Association, American Studies Association, Rocky Mountain American Studies Association (Vice-President), and the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment. Every time you buy a used book, CD, or DVD from the Alibris marketplace you keep it from ending up in a landfill. When you reach for your inexpensive used textbook, not only are you saving money, you're helping to keep trees in the forest, and to reduce pollution from the production of new paper. Save green when you go green! Find great deals on over 100 million used books, music, and movies at Alibris.