Four Classics: First Novels of Native America

FAIN: FV-50289-11

Western Washington University (Bellingham, WA 98225-5996)
John Purdy (Project Director: March 2011 to November 2014)

A five-week seminar for sixteen school teachers focusing on four contemporary Native American novels in their cultural contexts.

The goal of this five-week seminar is to examine, closely and in great detail, four classic Native American novels in the contexts of the cultures they explore, the canons of the authors who produced them, and the critical studies that have attempted to address them. These four first novels written by McNickle, Momaday, Welch and Silko represent the achievements of fledgling writers from very different backgrounds and experiences who faced very similar artistic and rhetorical challenges when they chose to write a novel. Each, in turn, provided noteworthy contributions to American literatures, in general, and collectively have come to represent a definitive core for the rapidly expanding canon of American Indian fiction.