Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1992
Abstract
Elizabeth Hanson's Paula Gunn Allen is a very good overview of the extensive body of work of an important scholar, critic, and writer. Through a balance of summary and critical analysis, Hanson examines the content, style, and purpose of Paula Gunn Allen's work. As Hanson suggests, to know something about Allen's life and work is "to gain insight into the trans-formative art" that reveals Allen's "exceptionally acute visionary power" (p. 5). Hanson maintains that this visionary power and the creativity to which it gives rise are consequences of Allen's situatedness outside Native American and Anglo-American culture. Hanson describes this particular situatedness as that of the "breed," a metaphor for the unique personal, spiritual, and aesthetic experience of writers such as Paula Gunn Allen (pps. 5, 8). Because Hanson perceives this situatedness as the wellspring of Allen's creativity and the consciousness that informs "her most important critical ideas," Hanson begins her discussion of Allen's work with a short biography that also compares Allen's personal and aesthetic experience with that of Leslie Silko. Subsequent sections focus on Allen's literary criticism and pedagogical concerns, her poetry and fiction, and her "tribal-feminism."
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly 12:2 (Spring 1992). Copyright © 1992 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.