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American Studies

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Series

2003

Articles 1 - 5 of 5

Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Reading Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, James H. Maguire Jan 2003

Reading Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, James H. Maguire

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

“Marilynne Robinson has written a first novel that one reads as slowly as poetry—and for the same reason: The language is so precise, so distilled, so beautiful that one doesn’t want to miss any pleasure it might yield up to patience” (Schreiber 14). Many other reviewers, critics, and general readers agree with reviewer Le Anne Schreiber that Robinson’s novel is beautifully written. And since Housekeeping’s virtual poetry echoes the beauty of the language found in works of nineteenth-century American writers such as Herman Melville and Emily Dickinson, it comes as no surprise that Robinson’s favorite authors are the American Romantics.


J. Ross Brown, Peter Wild Jan 2003

J. Ross Brown, Peter Wild

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

Caught by his own whimsical pen often used to illustrate his books, the writer sits on a log with sketch pad in hand. He’s in the midst of a vast, wild country. Behind him are mountains and, closer, an apparently abandoned adobe. Beneath a sans-souci floppy hat, he gazes over spectacles comically slid down his nose with that look of the artist in the intense act of considering a scene or of a schoolmarm about to scold. Yet there’s also a different kind of tension to his body. One eyebrow is raised, almost as if he’s listening for something behind …


Reading Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine, P. Jane Hafen Jan 2003

Reading Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine, P. Jane Hafen

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

The writings of Louise Erdrich not only reflect their author’s multilayered, complex background but they also confound a variety of literary genre and cultural categories. Although Erdrich is known primarily as a successful contemporary Native American writer, her finely polished writing reveals both her Turtle Mountain Chippewa and Euroamerican heritages. Nevertheless, her diverse imageries, subjects, and textual strategies reaffirm imperatives of American Indian survival. She prescribes the literary challenge for herself and other contemporary Native writers in her essay “Where I Ought to Be: A Writer’s Sense of Place”: “In the light of enormous loss, [contemporary Native writers] must tell …


Michael Mcclure, Rod Phillips Jan 2003

Michael Mcclure, Rod Phillips

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

The author of more than twenty volumes of poetry, over twenty plays, two novels, and three collections of essays, Michael McClure is one of the most prolific and enduring figures to emerge from the Beat movement. As one of the five poets to begin his career at the Six Gallery reading in 1955, the reading which launched the Beat movement, he shares a long and rich history with Allen Ginsberg, Philip Whalen, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder, Philip Lamantia, and many other writers of San Francisco’s Beat period.


Lawson Fusao Inada, Shawn Holliday Jan 2003

Lawson Fusao Inada, Shawn Holliday

Western Writers Series Digital Editions

On February 19, 1942, approximately ten weeks after Japanese fighter planes attacked the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt approved Executive Order 9066, which authorized the removal of all people of Japanese descent from vulnerable areas of the United States’ west coast. Meant as a security measure to protect the dams, power plants, harbors, railroads, and airports from spies who would attempt to compromise America’s vulnerable infrastructure, this order eventually led to the complete removal of all Japanese from Arizona, California, Oregon, and Washington, relocating 120,000 people by mid-1942 (Only What xi-xii). Such actions …