Robert Dale Parker has published books on Faulkner, a book on Elizabeth Bishop, several books on Native American literature, and How to Interpret Literature: Critical Theory for Literary and Cultural Studies (Oxford University Press). He is the Frank Hodgins Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Robert Dale Parker
Contributions
Modernist Literary Studies and the Aesthetics of American Indian Literatures
American Indian literary studies and mainstream modernist studies haunt each other. But for the most part, neither dares to face its ghost in the mirror. This essay sets out to provoke more thinking about the relation between American Indian literary studies and modernist studies and to invite critics to reconsider both fields in light of their parallel languages and polemics. As modernist studies begins to face the indigeneity it has neglected or trampled over, critics risk overlooking how theories of modernism are already embedded in the theories and criticism of American Indian literatures. In that context, modernist studies risks recovering an indigeneity that reproduces the modernism we already know.