Literature of Ethnic America Exam 2 Study Guide

Steal

To take or appropriate without right or leave with intent to keep or use of wrongfully; To take away by force or unjust means; To seize gain or win by trickery, skill, or daring

First Person Plural Perspective

Usually expressed through the word "We"; There is no individual speaker/perspective identified; the narrator is a member of a group that acts as a unit.

Sound effect

Verbal cue to sounds occurring

Caption

Verbal description accompanying image; May be above, below, or in caption box

Limited 3rd Person Perspective

We, as the reader, only see the thoughts and feelings of one character.

Personal Memoir, Oral Tradition, and Historical Commentary

What are the three Narrative Voices in "The Way to Rainy Mountain"?

She was gang raped by the men she hustled

What happened to Fleur that caused her to leave the reservation?

The men who raped Fleur die in the freezer, playing cards while waiting for someone to rescue them

What is the poetic justice in "Fleur"?

(Joy) Harjo

When the world as We Knew It Ended

Freezer

Where do the men who raped fleur take shelter when the tornado hits and consequently die after Pauline locks them in?

Gutter

White space between panels in comics

Pauline

Who is the narrator of "Fleur"?

Because it's a historical reference to how nazis portrayed Jews , it's also a visual comparison between how mice and rats are treated.

Why are Jews portrayed as mice in Maus?

Because she hustled them; she won all of their money with unlikely hands (pairs)

Why are the men angry with Fleur Pillager?

Because they give Fleur a power that she may not have in real life

Why does Pauline never extinguish the stories and rumors surrounding Fleur?

Because instead of it giving her the power to make the whites go away, it was forcing her (to some degree) to become more involved with them

Why was Aya angry and disappointed with learning to write her name after Danny and Ella are taken.

It was a sign of self empowerment, it was her mark that she was there and that she was a person (not a "savage).

Why was Aya, at first, proud of being able to write her name?

Because she knew how to play cards

Why were the men interested in Fleur Pillager?

Adrienne Rich

Yom Kippur 1984

Redemption

the action of saving or being saved from sin, error, or evil.

(Louise) Erdrich, Dear John Wayne

"A few laughing Indians fall over the hood slipping in the hot spilled butter. The eyes see alot, John, but the heart is so blind. Death makes us owners of nothing. He smiles, a horizon of teeth The credits reel over, and then the white fields Again blowing in the true-to-life dark. The dark films over everything. We get into the car Scratching our mosquito bites, speechless and small As people are when the movie is done. We are back in our skins."

(N. Scott) Momaday, The Way to Rainy Mountain

"A single knoll rises out of the plain in Oklahoma, north and west of the Wichita Range. For my people, the Kiowas, it is an old landmark, and they gave it the name Rainy Mountain. The hardest weather in the world is there. Winter brings blizzards, hot tornadic winds arise in the spring, and in the summer the prairie is an anvil's edge. The grass turns brittle and brown, and it racks beneath your feet. There are green belts along the rivers and creeks, linear groves of hickory and pecan. Willow and witch hazel. At a distance in July or August the streaming foliage seems almost to writhe in fire. Great green and yellow grasshoppers are everywhere in the tall grass like corn to sting the flesh, and tortoises crawl about on the red earth, going nowhere in plenty of time. Loneliness is an aspect of the lang. All things in the plain are isolate; there is no confusion of objects in the eye, but one hill or one tree or one man. To look upon that landscape in the early morning, with the sun at your back, is to lose the the sense of proportion. Your imagination comes to life, and this, you think, is where Creation was begun."

(Leslie Marmon) Silko, Lullaby

"Aya pulled the old Army blanket over her head like a shawl. Jimmie's blanket - the one he had sent to her. That was a long time ago and the green wool was faded, and it was unraveling on the edges. She did not want to think about Jimmie . So she thought about the weaving and the way her mother had done it. On the wall wooden loom set into the sand under a tamarack tree for shade."

(Adrienne) Rich, Yom Kippur 1984

"Find someone like yourself. Find others. Agree you will never desert each other. Understand that any rift among you means power to those who want to do you in. Close to the center, safety; toward the edges, danger. But I have a nightmare to tell: I am trying to say that to be with my people is my dearest wish but that I also love strangers that I crave separateness I hear myself stuttering these words to my worst friends and my best enemies who watch for my mistakes in grammar my mistakes in love. This is the day of atonement; but do my people forgive me? If a cloud knew loneliness and fear, I would be that cloud. To love the Stranger, to love solitude—am I writing merely about privilege about drifting from the center, drawn to edges, a privilege we can't afford in the world that is, who are hated as being of our kind: ****** kicked into the icy river, woman dragged from her stalled car into the mist-struck mountains, used and hacked to death young scholar shot at the university gates on a summer evening walk, his prizes and studies nothing, nothing availing his Blackness Jew deluded that she's escaped the tribe, the laws of her exclusion, the men too holy to touch her hand; Jew who has turned her back on midrash and mitzvah (yet wears the chai on a thong between her breasts) hiking alone found with a swastika carved in her back at the foot of the cliffs (did she die as queer or as Jew?)"

(Louise) Erdrich, Dear John Wayne

"How can we help but keep hearing his voice, The flip side of the soundtrack, still playing: Come on, boys, we got them Where we want them, drunk, running They'll give us what we want, what we need. Even his disease was the idea of taking everything. Those cells, burning, doubling, splitting out of their skins."

(Saul) Bellow, From the Adventures of Augie March, Chapter 1

"I am an American, Chicago born - Chicago, that somber city - and go at things as I have myself, freestyle, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent. But a man's character is his fate, says Heraclitus, and in the end there isn't any way to disguise the nature of the knocks by acoustical work on the door or gloving the knuckles. Everybody knows there is not finesse or accuracy of suppression; if you hold down one thing, you hold down the adjoining."

(Simon J.) Ortiz, From Sand Creek

"I couldn't have stolen anything; My life was stolen already. In protest though, I should have stolen. My life. My life."

(Adrienne) Rich, Yom Kippur 1984

"I drew solitude over me, on the longshore. —Robinson Jeffers, "Prelude" For whoever does not afflict his soul through this day, shall be cut off from his people. —Leviticus 23:29 What is a Jew in solitude? What would it mean not to feel lonely or afraid far from your own or those you have called your own? What is a woman in solitude: a queer woman or man? In the empty street, on the empty beach, in the desert what in this world as it is can solitude mean?"

(Philip) Roth, Defender of the Faith

"In May of 1945, on a few weeks after the fighting had ended in Europe, I was rotated back to the States, where I spent the remainder of the war with a training company at Camp Crowder, Missouri. We had been racing across Germany so swiftly during the late winter and spring that when I boarded the plane that drizzly morning in Berlin, I couldn't believe our destination lay to the west. My mind might inform me otherwise, but where we would disembark and continue our push - eastward until we'd circled the globe, marching through villages along whose twisting, cobbled streets crowded of the enemy would watch us take possession of what up toll then they'd considered their own . I had changed enough in two years not to mind the trembling of old people, the crying of the very young, enough for him to travel the weirdest paths without feeling a thing."

(Bernard) Malamud, The Magic Barrel

"Leo was informed by letter that she would meet him on a certain corner , and she was there one spring night , waiting under a street lamp. He appeared , carrying a small bouquet of flowers of violets and rosebuds. Stella stood by the lamp post, smoking. She wore white with red shoes, which fitted his expectations, although in a troubled moment he had imagined the dress red, and only the shoes white. She waited uneasily and shyly. From afar he saw that her eyes - clearly her father's - were filled with desperate innocence. He pictured her, in his own redemption. Violins and lit candles revolved in the sky. Leo ran forward with flowers outthrust. Around the corner, Salzman, leaning against a wall, chanted prayers for the dead."

(Adrienne) Rich, Yom Kippur 1984

"Robinson Jeffers, multitude is the blur flung by distinct forms against these landward valleys and the farms that run down to the sea; the lupines are multitude, and the torched poppies, the grey Pacific unrolling its scrolls of surf, and the separate persons, stooped over sewing machines in denim dust, bent under the shattering skies of harvest who sleep by shifts in never-empty beds have their various dreams Hands that pick, pack, steam, stitch, strip, stuff, shell, scrape, scour, belong to a brain like no other Must I argue the love of multitude in the blur or defend a solitude of barbed-wire and searchlights, the survivalist's final solution, have I a choice? To wonder far from your own or those you have called your own to hear strangeness calling you from far away and walk in that direction, long and far, not calculating risk to go to meet the Stranger without fear or weapon, protection nowhere on your mind (the Jew on the icy, rutted road on Christmas Eve prays for another Jew the woman in the ungainly twisting shadows of the street: Make those be a woman's footsteps; as if she could believe in a woman's god)"

(Simon J.) Ortiz, From Sand Creek

"She caught me; Carson caught Indians, Secured them with his lies. Bound them with his belief."

(Leslie Marmon) Silko, Lullaby

"She could see it clearly. She had been only a little girl when her grandma gave her the wooden combs to pull the twigs and burrs from the raw, freshly washed wool. And while she combed the wool, her grandma sat beside her, spinning a silvery strand of yarn around the smooth cedar spindle. Her mother worked at the loom with yarns dyed bright yellow and red and gold. She watched them dye the yarn in boiling black pots full of beeweed petals, juniper berries, and sage."

(Louise) Erdrich, Fleur

"She was haywire, out of control. She messed with evil, laughed at the old women's advice, and dressed like a man. She got herself into some half-forgotten medicine, studied ways we shouldn't talk about. Some say she kept the finger of a child in her pocket and a powder of unborn rabbits in a leather thong about her neck. She laid the heart of an owl on her tongue so she could see at night, and went out, hunting, not even in her own body. We know for sure because the next morning, in the snow or dust, we followed the tracks of her bare feet and saw they where they changed, where the claws sprang out, the pad broadened and pressed into the dirt. By night we heard her chuffing cough, the bear cough. By day her silence and the wide grin she threw to bring down or guard made us frightened. Some thought that Fleur Pillager should be driven off the reservation, but not a single person who spoke like this had the nerve. And finally, when people were just about to get together and throw her out, she left on her own and didn't come back all summer. That's what this story is about."

(Adrienne) Rich, Yom Kippur 1984

"Solitude, O taboo, endangered species on the mist-struck spur of the mountain, I want a gun to defend you In the desert, on the deserted street, I want what I can't have: your elder sister, Justice, her great peasant's hand outspread her eye, half-hooded, sharp and true And I ask myself, have I thrown courage away? have I traded off something I don't name? To what extreme will I go to meet the extremist? What will I do to defend my want or anyone's want to search for her spirit-vision far from the protection of those she has called her own? Will I find O solitude your plumes, your breasts, your hair against my face, as in childhood, your voice like the mockingbird's singing Yes, you are loved, why else this song? in the old places, anywhere?"

(Leslie Marmon) Silko, Lullaby

"The blankets her mother made were soft and woven so tight that rain rolled off them like birds' feathers. Ayah remembered sleeping warm on cold windy nights, wrapped in her mother's blankets on the hogan's sandy floor."

(Adrienne) Rich, Yom Kippur 1984

"The glassy, concrete octagon suspended from the cliffs with its electric gate, its perfected privacy is not what I mean the pick-up with a gun parked at a turn-out in Utah or the Golan Heights is not what I mean the poet's tower facing the western ocean, acres of forest planted to the east, the woman reading in the cabin, her attack dog suddenly risen is not what I mean Three thousand miles from what I once called home I open a book searching for some lines I remember about flowers, something to bind me to this coast as lilacs in the dooryard once bound me back there—yes, lupines on a burnt mountainside, something that bloomed and faded and was written down in the poet's book, forever: Opening the poet's book I find the hatred in the poet's heart: . . . the hateful-eyed and human-bodied are all about me: you that love multitude may have them"

(Louise) Erdrich, Dear John Wayne

"The sky fills, acres of blue squint and eye That the crowd cheers. His face moves over us, A thick cloud of vengeance, pitted Like the land that was once flesh. Each rut, Each scar makes a promise: It is Not over, this fight, not as long as you resist. Everything we see belongs to us."

(Louise) Gluck, A Fable

"Two women with the same claim Came to the feet of The wise king. Two women, But only one baby. The king knew Someone was lying. What he said was Let the child be cut in half; that way No one will go Empty-handed. He Drew his sword. Then, of the two Women, one Renounced her share: This was The sign, the lesson. Suppose You saw your mother Torn between two daughters: What could you do To save her but be Willing to destroy Yourself - she would know Who was the rightful child, The one who couldn't bear To divide the mother."

(Louise) Erdrich, Fleur

"Unless you are Fleur Pillager. We all knew she couldn't swim. After the first time, we thought she'd never go back to lake Turcot. We thought she'd keep to herself, live quiet, stop killing men off by drowning in the lake. After the first time, we'd thought she'd keep the good ways. But then, after the second drowning, we knew that we were dealing with something much more serious."

(Joy) Harjo, When the world as We Knew It Ended

"We saw it all, as we changed diapers and fed The babies. We saw it, Through the branches of the knowledgeable tree Through the snags of stars, through The sun and storms from our knees As we bathed and washed The floors."

(Joy) Harjo, When the world as We Knew It Ended

"We were dreaming on an occupied island at the farthest edge of a trembling nation when it went down. Two towers rose up from the east island of commerce and touched The sky. Men walked on the moon. Oil was sucked dry By two brothers. Then it went down. Swallowed By a fire dragon, by oil and fear. Eaten whole. It was coming."

(Adrienne) Rich, Yom Kippur 1984

"What is a Jew in solitude? What is a woman in solitude, a queer woman or man? When the winter flood-tides wrench the tower from the rock, crumble the prophet's headland, and the farms slide into the sea when leviathan is endangered and Jonah becomes revenger when center and edges are crushed together, the extremities crushed together on which the world was founded when our souls crash together, Arab and Jew, howling our loneliness within the tribes when the refugee child and the exile's child re-open the blasted and forbidden city when we who refuse to be women and men as women and men are chartered, tell our stories of solitude spent in multitude in that world as it may be, newborn and haunted, what will solitude mean?"

metaphor

A comparison that establishes a figurative identity between objects being compared.

Simile

A comparison using "like" or "as"

Magic Realism

A literary or artistic genre in which realistic narrative and naturalistic technique are combined with surreal elements of dream or fantasy. In this text, magic has been established to exist and actually affect the characters in the story.

Extended Metaphor

A metaphor developed at great length, occurring frequently in or throughout a work.

Roman a clef

A novel about real life, overlaid with a façade of fiction. The fictitious names in the novel represent real people, and the "key" is the relationship between the nonfiction and the fiction.

Fable

A short tale to teach a moral lesson, often with animals or inanimate objects as characters.

Medicine

An object held in traditional American Indian belief to give control over natural or magical forces; also: magical power or a magical rite.

Panel

Box containing an image in comics

Thought bubble

Bubble containing thoughts of characters (differentiated from dialogue through direct arrows and ellipse-like dots).

Dialogue bubble

Bubble containing words spoken by characters

Mishepishu

Chippewa Lake God of the Underworld

(Louise) Erdrich

Dear John Wayne

(Philip) Roth

Defender of the Faith

(Louise) Erdrich

Fleur

(Simon J.) Ortiz

From Sand Creek

(Saul) Bellow

From the Adventures of Augie March

Personification

Giving human characteristics to nonhuman things

John Wayne

He is the face of old western films and is portrayed as the ideal American Masculinity - being Stoic, Tough, Fiercely Independent, Etiquitable, and having a fetishistic interest in Guns.

Nobel Peace Prize

How can we know if a group has "made it" in Emergent Literature?

Pan-Native American Identity

In Joy Harjo's "When the world as We Knew It Ended", what group was Harjo affiliating herself with? Who was "We"?

What does Judaism mean to you, compared to me

In the Haggadah, the wise son and wicked son debate the same thing, what are they debating?

Inertia

Indisposition to motion, exertion, or change

Shul

Jewish Synagogue

Kaddish

Jewish prayer for the dead

Emergent Literature

Literature that is written by and for marginalized cultures with the aim of challenging and reshaping the US mainstream: both mainstream culture and the canonical American literary tradition.

(Leslie Marmon) Silko

Lullaby

(Art) Spiegelman

Maus

Hogan

Navajo Hut

Anaphora

Repetition of a word/phrase/meaning

Alliteration

Repetition of the same sounds; consecutive words near each other in a passage

Haggadah

Text containing the liturgy for the Seder service on the Jewish festival of Passover.

(Bernard) Malamud

The Magic Barrel

(N. Scott) Momaday

The Way to Rainy Mountain

poetic justice

The fact of experiencing a fitting or deserved retribution for one's actions.

Graphic Novel

The fusion of image and text; It's basically a comic

(Simon J.) Ortiz, From Sand Creek

"After winter, Our own lives fled. I reassured her What she believed. Bought a sweater. And fled. I should have stolen. My life. My life."

(Simon J.) Ortiz, From Sand Creek

"At the Salvation Army A clerk Caught me Wandering Among old spoons And knives, Sweaters and shoes."

(Joy) Harjo, When the world as We Knew It Ended

"We had been watching since the eve of the missionaries in their long and solemn clothes, to see what would happen. We saw it From the kitchen window over the sink As we made coffee, cooked rice and Potatoes, enough for an army."

(Louise) Gluck

A Fable

Allusion

A reference to another work of literature, person, or event

No, because if someone like Grossbart gets away with doing this self-serving behavior, it makes everyone look awful and people just affirm the further oppression of other Jews.

Is Philip Roth a self-hating Jew?

tornado

What hits the reservation after Fleur leaves?