Western American Literature最新文献

{"title":"Oklahoma Odyssey: A Novel by John Mort (review)","authors":"Steve Yates","doi":"10.1353/wal.2023.a904155","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2023.a904155","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Oklahoma Odyssey: A Novel by John Mort Steve Yates John Mort, Oklahoma Odyssey: A Novel. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2022. 324 pp. Paper, $24.95; e-book, $24.95. There should be an official novel form delineated to describe a fiction in which a carnival of characters from all around a countryside collide with neighbors and a few outworlders in one grand event. “Kermesse” feels right, especially after reading John Mort’s novel Oklahoma Odyssey, which is Brueghel-like in its masterful balance of detail and sketch, its sweeping management of characters and setting, and its energetic capture of seething motion. Many novels hinge on some country fair or mass human event that sets the action off or culminates it. Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, or Joseph Roth’s The Radetzky March, or John Williams’s Butcher’s Crossing, or Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian spring to mind. Border crossings and life changings coruscate when these carnivalesque happenings—the last gasps of an empire, the last buffalo hunt, one of the last Indian massacres—go down. Tribes crash together in a frenzy sometimes as devouring as Judge Holden’s dance, but always dizzying and, eventually, fatefully reorienting. Oklahoma Odyssey is a kermesse novel, then, a tale of the last land run into Oklahoma at its border with Kansas. Everyone hurries and kicks to make “the best of a piece of bad luck,” as occasional protagonist, Ulysses Kreider, sums up his life (306). [End Page 167] The grand event of that final land run serves as both backdrop and driver. United States cavalry sweep out Cherokees and squatters, including bad guy Eddie Mole. Mort deploys a number of moves antithetical to the traditional genre Western, among them the infrequency of Mole’s appearances. Mole murders Ulysses “Euly” Kreider’s father in the opening scene then flees, remaining a storm cloud on the horizon throughout. This meteorological distancing prevents the villain from becoming the most interesting character and ensures that his criminality lacks romance. In a kermesse novel, it is sometimes hard to identify one protagonist. There can be and maybe there always should be many compelling characters. Mort positions each at a precarious borderland externally and internally. Euly is Mennonite, of German-speaking Ukrainian immigrant stock, but his apostate and ambitious father, a tireless freight hauler, ran whiskey. Euly’s “cousin” Kate, adopted by Uncle Helmut and Aunt Annelise, wonders whether she is part Black or part Osage, artist or Mennonite. Her beloved, Johnny Heart of Oak, is Osage but adopted and raised Mennonite. He bears name and traits, good and bad, from both tribes. Even the times these characters inhabit prove liminal. The novel begins in 1892 when the buffalo seem but a memory and the automobile but a rumor. Mort creates unforgettable settings and situations. Kate, with a partial inheritance, travels to grindingly urban Kansas City. Rather than solely focus on business school (a ","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"69 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135145226","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Topographies of Western Violence in Claire Vaye Watkins’s Battleborn","authors":"Sofía Martinicorena","doi":"10.1353/wal.2023.a904150","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2023.a904150","url":null,"abstract":"Topographies of Western Violence in Claire Vaye Watkins’s Battleborn Sofía Martinicorena (bio) All landscapes are haunted by ghosts. Patricia Price The West for me is a haunted place. There are these mythic ghosts everywhere you go. Claire Vaye Watkins The US West, a geomythic stronghold of the US national imagination as well as a transnational phenomenon, keeps being revised, rewritten, and reimagined. With the publication of her 2012 short story collection Battleborn, Californian author Claire Vaye Watkins established herself as a prominent US western writer, pondering the “legacy of the gold rush and westward expansion” (Watkins, “Nevada Gothic”) and “interrogating the myth of the American West” (Watkins, “‘Interrogating’”). Titled after Nevada’s historical nickname, Battleborn draws its attention to the state where Watkins herself grew up—a western region that has received less scholarly attention than others (Rio 17–18). Comprising ten stories varying in style and length, the volume revolves around a coterie of tortured characters who inhabit the US West. From gold diggers in the Old West to struggling mothers in contemporary California, Watkins’s westerners are troubled by a problematic past, both personal and historical.1 With the publication of Battleborn, Watkins started treading a path that has been recently explored by other writers who have also addressed the ways the West is, and has been, imagined. One thing that unites these writers is their reliance on a representation of a [End Page 99] West that is defined by its concomitant violence—whether in relation to gender-identity construction, as represented in Emma Cline’s The Girls (2016) and Daddy (2020); the overlooked history of racial violence against Asian Americans of C Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills Is Gold (2020); or the sexual politics of the Wild West in Anna North’s Outlawed (2021), among others.2 At odds with the Stegnerian, hopeful vision of the West stand texts that insist on the quintessential conception of the West as a violent space—an idea that Richard Slotkin famously theorized in his “regeneration through violence” thesis, which posits that early American narratives of warfare between Puritans and Indigenous populations “formed the literary basis of the first American mythology” (Regeneration 56), especially as they later developed into frontier narratives. Presenting the West as a space defined by violence, then, is not only not new but an emblematic trait of dominant western culture. However, this archetypal manifestation of violence was, in the western myth, self-affirming and self-aggrandizing—a violence that served to legitimize and uplift the Anglo-white settler project that obscured and silenced the actual violence perpetrated against Indigenous peoples and the environment. Battleborn, despite its insistence on the violent ways of life in the West, abandons the realm of hegemonic myth and deals instead with a different kind of violence—one closer to the","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"256 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135144949","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Tributary Voices: Literary and Rhetorical Exploration of the Colorado River by Paul A. Formisano (review)","authors":"Ned Schaumberg","doi":"10.1353/wal.2023.a904162","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2023.a904162","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Tributary Voices: Literary and Rhetorical Exploration of the Colorado River by Paul A. Formisano Ned Schaumberg Paul A. Formisano, Tributary Voices: Literary and Rhetorical Exploration of the Colorado River. Reno: U of Nevada P, 2022. 272 pp. Paper, $45. Tributary Voices offers a tripartite argument where each component seems clear and obvious when considered separately. But by weaving these arguments together across genres and cultures, Paul A. Formisano offers a holistic understanding of the glaring absences in mainstream discourse surrounding the Colorado River that is sorely needed amidst the environmental and political crises magnifying each other throughout the watershed. Most simply, Formisano points out how “the frontier, garden, and wilderness myths [that] have powerfully informed the textual production of the Colorado River” belie the diversity of cultures strategically appropriating elements of those myths (12). In other words, communities throughout the watershed describe their relationships with the Colorado in ways that gesture toward common conceptions while carving out distinct features. At the same time, Formisano shows how this diversity of “tributary voices” is not a new understanding but a set of long-standing, ongoing traditions with the potential to “reveal alternative epistemologies and practices . . . that offer pathways by which to both acknowledge the challenges before us today and offer hope for the future” (18). The breadth of source material and Formisano’s thoughtful interconnection thereof make Tributary Voices a welcome inclusion to studies of western North America. Each chapter juxtaposes a well-known Colorado River discourse with a group of tributary voices in conversation with it. From female river runners (chapter 3), to Hispano and Latina/o discourse communities on both sides of the [End Page 183] border (chapter 4), the Navajo Nation (chapter 5), and stewardship-focused Mormons (chapter 6), Formisano shows how allegedly tributary voices have long played integral roles in discussions of the Colorado River by directly and indirectly responding to ostensibly dominant texts. Conversation and interconnection are also essential to the theoretical framework outlined in chapter 1. Since, Formisano argues, “the watershed operates as both a metaphor and a physical entity that implies and delineates boundaries,” the “convergence of ecological and rhetorical frameworks” can lead to a “rhetorical listening” that “opens up a space in which we contemplate other stories and relationships to the Colorado with the goal of enhancing our understanding of where we and others stand on particular issues, especially when common ground is hard to come by” (23, 47). I emphasize this strategic juxtaposition because it questions the thirst for narrowly conceived “innovation” or “groundbreaking” argumentation in the same way the fictional and nonfictional texts it examines question technological innovation and/or literal gro","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135145068","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"A Fable of the Anthropocene: The Disturbing Naturalist Humanity in Frank Norris’s The Octopus","authors":"Daichi Sugai","doi":"10.1353/wal.2023.a904152","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2023.a904152","url":null,"abstract":"A Fable of the AnthropoceneThe Disturbing Naturalist Humanity in Frank Norris’s The Octopus Daichi Sugai (bio) A key trope in literary naturalism is that natural force over-weighs individual power. In The Octopus (1901) Presley, a poet, narrates one of the characteristics of American naturalism that subsumes individual human affairs into an environmentally deterministic whole: “men were naught, death was naught, life was naught; FORCE only existed” (1084). The concept of force beyond personal power and intention bolsters Frank Norris’s first volume of the would-be Wheat trilogy. However, Norris’s use of force was influenced by nineteenth-century thermodynamics, and its sociological adaptations diverge into representations of several laws, such as the law of biological reproduction, heterosexual love, and the marketplace.1 For instance, Presley contemplates, “FORCE that brought men into the world, FORCE that crowded them out of it to make way for the succeeding generation, FORCE that made the wheat grow” (1084). Norris uses erotic and heterosexual metaphors to describe the cultivation of land and regards plowing as a heterosexual love affair of the “two world-forces, the elemental Male and Female” (680). Shelgrim, the president of the railroad, says in a conversation with Presley, “The Wheat is one force, the Railroad, another, and there is the law that governs them—supply and demand” (1037). Although Norris’s employment of force ramifies into several leitmotifs, they share the same basis that individual power cannot resist a current of environmental or “natural” forces beyond human agency. This naturalist concept—the “discourse of force” in Mark Seltzer’s terms (29)—deprives humans of their free will and reduces them to a part of an indifferent system of force. No wonder Walter Benn Michaels dismisses the relationship between the naturalist [End Page 143] force and individual power in The Octopus as follows: “The point is not simply that human agents are less powerful than nature but that, reduced to the ‘forces’ they really are, human agents are not agents at all” (201).2 I argue, however, that—considering the Anthropocene debate in recent years—force in literary naturalism is not a natural occur-rence independent of human activities; instead, individual power fortifies the naturalist force. Although June Howard points out that naturalist novels dramatize the “antinomy between fate and hope, between determinism and human will” (39), I believe Norris’s naturalist idea of force exhibits not so much antinomy as a conspiracy between deterministic environmental force and individual power. The term “Anthropocene” designates a period in geological time in which humans have come to play a definitive and crucial role in the planet’s ecology. Although there are arguments regarding its time frame, this time frame can be compellingly situated as the beginning of the industrial revolution, when the human impact on Earth reached unprecedented intensity (Bonne","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135145225","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Association Between Clozapine Plasma Concentration, CYP2D6 (*10, *2) Polymorphisms and Risk of Adverse Reactions.","authors":"Kankan Qu, Qin Zhou, Haohao Zhu, Zhenhe Zhou, Yuan Shen, Lin Tian, Xujiang Su","doi":"10.5152/pcp.2023.22392","DOIUrl":"10.5152/pcp.2023.22392","url":null,"abstract":"<p><strong>Background: </strong>The aim of this article was to study the relationships between the risk of adverse reactions, plasma concentration, and cytochrome P450 2D6 rs1065852 (*10) and rs16947 (*2) polymorphisms for clozapine.</p><p><strong>Methods: </strong>The steady-state clozapine plasma concentration of 100 Chinese inpatients with schizophrenia was determined using 2-dimensional liquid chromatography. The polymorphisms of cytochrome P450 2D6 (*10 and *2) were determined using fluorescent in situ hybridization protocols.</p><p><strong>Results: </strong>The decreased percentages of white blood cells and neutrophils and the elevated percentages of creatine kinase, alanine aminotransferase, and aspartate transferase in patients treated with clozapine for 6 months were linearly associated with clozapine plasma concentration. Compared with the corresponding groups, the clozapine plasma concentrations of individuals with the *10TT genotype and individuals with the *2CC genotype were the highest (<i>P</i> < .05). The decreased percentages of white blood cells and neutrophils and elevated percentages of creatine kinase, alanine aminotransferase, and aspartate transferase for patients with the *10TT genotype were significantly higher than those for patients with the *10CC and *10CT genotypes (<i>P</i> < .05). The decreased percentages of white blood cells and neutrophils and increased percentages of creatine kinase, alanine aminotransferase, and aspartate transferase for patients with the *2CC genotype were significantly higher than those of the other groups (<i>P</i> < .05). The therapeutic reference range of clozapine for Chinese patients with schizophrenia was defined as 102.5-483.1 ng/mL.</p><p><strong>Conclusion: </strong>This study demonstrated that the determination of cytochrome P450 2D6 polymorphisms and therapeutic drug monitoring of clozapine might be beneficial for identifying patients with a higher risk of adverse reactions.</p>","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"26 1","pages":"76-83"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11082567/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"82032890","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Enchantments of the Mississippi: A Contemplative Journey of Time and Place by Thomas Becknell (review)","authors":"Susan Naramore Maher","doi":"10.1353/wal.2023.a904158","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2023.a904158","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Enchantments of the Mississippi: A Contemplative Journey of Time and Place by Thomas Becknell Susan Naramore Maher Thomas Becknell, Enchantments of the Mississippi: A Contemplative Journey of Time and Place, illustrated by Kari Vick. Saint Paul, MN: Beaver’s Pond Press, 2022. 189 pp. Paper, $15.95. The Mississippi River, Thomas Becknell reflects, is “terrible and wonderful” (13). From its birth waters in Lake Itasca in northern Minnesota, the Mississippi flows 2,340 miles to the Gulf of Mexico. Geographical fact and the linear mileage of the river, however, remain in the background of Becknell’s artful narrative. In gauging the terrible and wonderful, Becknell structures his book in six sections, built layer upon layer from deposits of natural and human history. Having spent decades living near the Mississippi, Becknell folds personal memories and experiences into the mix. In search of “enchantment,” not “the thrill of adventure,” he pursues river stories that intrigue, enlighten, or discomfort. Beauty abounds, but so does tragedy. Much haunts the Mississippi, even as its shores enchant. Indeed, difficult moments in Becknell’s own life tie in with river waters, which exert a continual pull on the author. His skill at weaving in the personal with the longitudinal, the individual’s shortened perspective against the deep layers of the riverscape, is one of the principal enchantments of the book. Becknell has walked, biked, kayaked, and driven the many pathways, [End Page 174] passages, and highways along or in the Mississippi. Proximity to the river defines his adult years. Over millennia, humans have traveled the Mississippi, north and south, in pursuit of dreams, conquest, wealth, escape, safety, refuge, and freedom. Ancient effigy mounds, thousands of years old, speak to the pursuit of the sacred as well. Atop imposing bluffs, Becknell tells us, “what I’m looking for is that fabric of sacred solitude, and it continues to elude me” (143). Becknell sees that earlier people faced frustration, and trauma, too: the French explorer La Salle, “ambushed in 1687 by his own crew” after traveling thousands of miles (25); Joseph Smith and his Mormon followers, who in 1844 faced violence in Nauvoo, Illinois; the Mdewakanton Dakota forced into concentration camps at Fort Snelling in 1862; and more recently, poet John Berryman, who in 1972 “leaped to his death” off the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis, one of many such suicides off bridges in the cities and towns along the Mississippi. Becknell pulls his readers into the darkness of these stories because they are an essential part of river lore. But they are not the whole of it. In a narrative that is also about “falling in love, all over again,” Becknell embraces “the currents of time, the beauty of life, and the consolation of the spirit” (15). He looks for kinship and connection. He retraces Henry David Thoreau’s final American sojourn up the Mississippi to Minnesota in the year before tu","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"7 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135144944","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Lost in the New West: Reading Williams, McCarthy, Proulx and McGuane by Mark Asquith (review)","authors":"Scott Pearce","doi":"10.1353/wal.2023.a904153","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2023.a904153","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Lost in the New West: Reading Williams, McCarthy, Proulx and McGuane by Mark Asquith Scott Pearce Asquith, Mark. Lost in the New West: Reading Williams, McCarthy, Proulx and McGuane. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. 243 pp. Hardcover, $120; e-book, $108. Mark Asquith sees that getting lost in the West, or perhaps feeling that the West is lost, is an easy thing to do because a notion of what the West is has become uncertain and convoluted. The West, as Asquith contends, is commonly seen as a loosely defined geographical space, or a political theory, or a romantic escape, or a set of tacky images, or something of an assemblage of these. Thus, “for writers seeking to engage with the West, this identity problem is exacerbated by the long shadow cast by the Western” (7). As the subtitle suggests, Lost in the New West: Reading Williams, McCarthy, Proulx and McGuane, Asquith is primarily concerned with four writers, John Williams, Cormac McCarthy, Annie Proulx, and Thomas McGuane, and the ways in which the West remains alive in their works and the works of others. The four chapters in this book examine how each of the four writers work to demythologize many of the classical Western genre tropes. This begins with John Williams’s Butcher’s Crossing. Asquith’s work is timely given the upcoming film adaptation of Butcher’s Crossing and the uncertainty as to what that film will do with Williams’s novel. Asquith provides astute and engaging analysis and writes in such a way that this book is sure to appeal to the academic crowd and equally to those readers interested in the changing nature of the Western. In particular, Asquith discusses Williams’s work in relation to the unfettered consumption of flora and fauna and the gendered binaries that subjugate and limit social and emotional mobility. Yet, it is, conversely, as Asquith acknowledges, these very acts that have driven economic development in the West. The second chapter focuses on Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and the Border Trilogy. Asquith brings a new reading to [End Page 163] McCarthy’s work, a difficult task given the plethora of articles, books, and book chapters focused on McCarthy’s body of work. Asquith finds parallels to aspects of McCarthy’s characterization and narrative in a broad range of texts, from Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to Lonely are the Brave (directed by David Miller, 1962) to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Yet, Asquith never loses sight of the West and the focus on masculine performance in the Border Trilogy is particularly impressive. There is, seemingly, for Asquith, an inescapable West that persists in McCarthy’s work, and the work of the other writers, one that is frightening and alluring, both in its depictions and its critique of the varied constructs attached to the West. In writing about Annie Proulx, Asquith contends that “Proulx’s West remains dangerous because it is surreal; it is a potent mixture of mythology and exoticism that is both ","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"8 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135144947","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Critical Regionality and(Mis-)Translation: The Modernist Elision of Pueblo Source Material in Mary Austin’s Later Career","authors":"D. Seth Horton","doi":"10.1353/wal.2023.a904151","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2023.a904151","url":null,"abstract":"Critical Regionality and(Mis-)TranslationThe Modernist Elision of Pueblo Source Material in Mary Austin’s Later Career D. Seth Horton (bio) Here is the standard précis of Mary Austin’s biography: Her mother was cold, her childhood in Illinois lonely, and later, after she moved to California, her family life remained troubled. She left her husband, who could not seem to find steady work, and subsequently placed her daughter in an institution because she could no longer solely care for her special needs. Originally a regional outsider, she relied on a sharp empirical eye to become a prolific and sympathetic interpreter of the Southwest’s cultural landscape. Although her presence in the desert was part of the nineteenth- century colonization of the American West, she nevertheless became a self-proclaimed activist in her day for Chicanx and Native Americans, even if contemporary scholars now recognize that her writing suffers from cultural appropriation. Her books, especially those published early in her career, employed sparse, cadenced prose to describe the specificities of desert life. Locating the cultural heart of the nation in the Southwest, she was one of the great regional writers of the early twentieth century. Always more than a field guide, she allowed herself to be changed by her new environment, and this transformation resulted in a new, hybridized identity serving as a feminist model for other women. It is a life story that has been told and retold in conference papers, articles, dissertations, critical books, and five different biographies: T. M. Pearce’s Mary Hunter Austin (1965), Augusta Fink’s I- Mary (1983), Esther Lanigan Stineman’s Mary Austin: Song of a Maverick (1989), Peggy Pond Church’s Wind’s Trail: The Early Life of Mary Austin (1990), [End Page 121] and most recently, Susan Goodman and Carl Dawson’s Mary Austin and the American West (2009). While Austin’s biographers are in agreement that she gradually came to see herself as someone who could translate Native American texts and belief systems to the rest of the country, the full ramifications of this interpretive position have not yet been adequately appreciated. To correct this critical blind spot, I will here trace out how Austin’s attempts to speak for the “other” resulted in increasingly radical translations. This will raise a series of problems to be explored in detail: what is her theory of translation; how did it change throughout the course of her career; and how might critical regionality reveal connections between her project and other modernist theories of translations? To answer these questions, I will provide a close reading of her first and most influential book, The Land of Little Rain (1903), supplementing it with a brief analysis of Lost Borders (1909). I will then discuss how her theory of translation changed with the publication of The American Rhythm: Studies and Reëxpressions of Amerindian Songs (1923), which I will then read in conjunction with Ezra P","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135145071","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Produce Wagon: New and Selected Poems by Roy Scheele (review)","authors":"Mark Sanders","doi":"10.1353/wal.2023.a904159","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2023.a904159","url":null,"abstract":"Reviewed by: Produce Wagon: New and Selected Poems by Roy Scheele Mark Sanders Roy Scheele, Produce Wagon: New and Selected Poems. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2022. 238 pp. Paper, $19.95; e-book, $19.95. Roy Scheele’s Produce Wagon: New and Selected Poems, the latest in Ted Kooser’s Contemporary Poetry series, is a collection long overdue. Featuring a generous selection of more than 120 poems, Produce Wagon represents Scheele’s lifetime achievement—a staggering half-century of poetry writing—from his earliest chapbook, Accompanied (1974), to uncollected and new poems. This book’s publication is something to celebrate. Just to clarify, Produce Wagon renews my long-held fondness for Scheele’s poetry. As a young man growing up on Nebraska’s Great Plains, I sought poetry in the voice of Plains-speaking people; and, at age nineteen, I found Scheele and his contemporaries: Kloefkorn, Kooser, Don Welch, Kuzma, Deal, and Kathleen K. West. These poets were principal influences of Nebraska’s literary renaissance, at the head of the poetry and little press movement of the 1970s, which, to this day, persists in my home state. I bought Accompanied when it was first published and also found Scheele’s work in a number of Nebraska’s small journals. Then, years later, I met him at a reading at Lincoln’s Sheldon Museum of Art when he shared a copy of Noticing (1979). Significant things arose from these early encounters. One, Accompanied (along with Kooser’s A Local Habitation and A Name) served as a model for short, Plains-centered lyrics; two, Kuzma’s work as publisher of Accompanied (and of Best Cellar Press) excited my desire to start a small press. Scheele’s Noticing was critical [End Page 176] to my decision, and I began Sandhills Press in 1979 due, in large part, to Scheele’s encouragement. As a young poet, though, I hoped to write about things I knew, as my Nebraska counterparts were doing. I read everything of Scheele’s I could find and, years forward, published two of his books, Pointing Out the Sky (1985) and Short Suite (1997) on Sand-hills imprints. I have read his poetry for nearly as long as he has written it; the University of Nebraska Press’s publication of Produce Wagon renews my kinship to Scheele’s work and confirms I was right about it all along. But this is mere context. The value, ultimately, is in the poems, and Produce Wagon bears an abundance of exceptional fruit. Scheele is master of the short lyric. Often imagistic, often reflective and deeply musical, his lyrics draw readers to intimacies of person, place, or thing (to echo Karl Shapiro) that hold us attentive, watching and listening. Consider “Remembrances” (3), where Scheele devises associations between winged creatures to circumstances and to people deserving remembrance. Scheele writes about a cardinal “in her nest in the bare forsythia,” “to remember / that lucid evening [your mother] pointed it out to me.” The poet, for himself, chooses “the hawk and that winter / day I turned . . .","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135145070","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"“Shackle-Breakers” and “Adventure-Makers”: Fantasies of the US West at Oregon Health and Science University","authors":"Pamela Pierce","doi":"10.1353/wal.2023.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.2023.0014","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":23875,"journal":{"name":"Western American Literature","volume":"58 1","pages":"29 - 46"},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43370920","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}