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Undermining landscape, gender and indigenous peoples in contemporary North American Great Plains literature
Abstract
My interdisciplinary study focuses on the imaginative construction of the Great Plains in the region's contemporary literature. The term colonial imagination first arrived on the Great Plains without an adequate paradigm to describe the region or the experience. European explorers and settlers described the region as a desert, until more fertile lands had been largely claimed, at which time the Great Plains are described as a virgin garden. The majority of regional descriptors have fallen into one or the other of these inadequate paradigms. Both paradigms of desert and garden carry set interpretations--of environment, women and Indigenous People. These paradigms treat all three as aspects of the region to be colonized, which is manifested in a Subject-Object relationship. These Great Plains paradigms have been discussed individually in several critical, historical, and literary studies of the region. However, we find ourselves on the brink of a new millennium, and extensive sedentary habitation has proven that European conceptual models are not particularly useful here. Given current searches for sustainability and the revamping of political and social models, are fiction writers and filmmakers leading a re-visioning of the Great Plains? If so, are they undermining a colonial patriarchy, or are they maintaining their predecessors' failed value systems? My dissertation addresses the following questions: How do landscape and Indigenous peoples and women figure within each author's imaginative construction? Do writers of various backgrounds construct these paradigms differently? If we envision these constructions as a continuum, with the left side marked by previous European conceptions, how does the continuum shift at the close of the twentieth century? What demarcates movement toward the right? To what degree are the environment, Indigenous peoples, and women imaginatively constructed as colonial ground? And, how do imagined characters in texts relate to the global theme of colonization and recovery from colonization? How these recent authors--Henry Kreisel, Larry McMurtry, and Director Martin Ritt--imagine the Great Plains says much about the state of the North American imagination and imaginative culture. It is my hope that a new paradigm for construction of human relationship as a gendered function of environment is being created in this place.
Subject Area
Literature|Canadian literature|American literature
Recommended Citation
Spaulding, Lisa Marie, "Undermining landscape, gender and indigenous peoples in contemporary North American Great Plains literature" (1998). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI9902976.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI9902976