Reconstructing Reality: The Mythmaking of Walt Whitman and Leslie Marmon Silko - Softcover

Chriqui, Sheri

Softcover

ISBN 10: 3639285204 ISBN 13: 9783639285208

Publisher: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller, 2010

Synopsis

This book studies the revisionary mythmaking of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass and Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony. More specifically, it explores Whitman's reworking of the Judeo-Christian Adamic myth in his "Children of Adam" poetry cluster, and Marmon Silko's reworking of Laguna Pueblo and Navajo conceptions of witchery? as well as the effects of such a reworking upon her presentation of Laguna's foundational mythic narratives. This study considers each artist's respective contextual foundations and specific revisionary strategies and purposes. It inquires into how Whitman and Marmon Silko's engagement of mythic discourses functions within their poems/narratives; how it fulfills their socio-ideological agendas; how it interpellates readers as participants in their presented mythic (re)visions; and, ultimately, how it interpolates hegemonic societal conceptions of reality and offers more fully integrated approaches toward life.

About this title

About the Author

Sheri Chriqui's studies focus on the culturally transformative potential that the presence of a mythic discourse, and the revisionary use of mythic narratives, grants a literary text, as well as the reconstructive implications of such revisions for socio-cultural perceptions of reality. She is an English teacher in the Los Angeles area.

Edition details

• Publisher: VDM Verlag Dr. Müller
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 3639285204
• ISBN 13: 9783639285208
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 168