Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Winter 2011
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly 31:1 (Winter 2011).
Abstract
Art as Performance, Story as Criticism is a grand experiment. In it, Womack plays with the possibilities of critical form as well as analytic content. One of the commonplaces of Native literary studies is that knowledge is made through story, so artistic production should count as a means of studying the world. Following this line of thought, Womack here blends story with more conventional scholarship, creating a multilayered counterpoint that conveys more the sense of an opening to a conversation than the self-enclosure that can emanate from thesis-driven arguments. In this vein, the pieces collected here-ranging from new short stories and a play to extended engagements with still under-examined writers like E. Pauline Johnson, Alexander Posey, Lynn Riggs, Durango Mendoza, and Beth Brant-prove more evocative than conclusive, raising questions and tracing errancies rather than following a single conceptual through line. Both the book's greatest strength and its weakness, this organizational strategy presents a series of linked, open-ended challenges to critical conventions in the field, while also potentially leaving the reader feeling a bit disoriented as to where to go from here.
Comments
Copyright © 2011 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska.