Poetics refers generally to the theory of literary forms^[1] and literary discourse.^{[citation needed]} It may refer specifically to the theory of poetry, although some speakers use the term so broadly as to denote the concept of "theory" itself.^{[citation needed]}

History[link]

Scholar T.V.F. Brogan identifies^[2] three major movements in Western poetics over the past 3000 years, beginning with the formalist, objectivist Aristotelian tradition. During the romantic era, poetics tended toward expressionism and emphasized the perceiving subject. The 20th century witnessed a return to the Aristotelian paradigm, followed by trends toward metacriticality, or the establishment of a theory of poetics.

Eastern poetics developed primarily with reference to the lyric, as opposed to the mimetic.^[2]

See also[link]

Poetry portal

• Poetry
• List of basic poetry topics
• Figure of speech
• Stylistic device
• Rhetorical device
• Meter (poetry)
• Allegory
• Allusion
• Imagery
• Musical form
• Symbolist poetry
• Refrain
• Literary theory
• History of poetry
• Poetics and Linguistics Association
• Theopoetics

Notes and references[link]

Further reading[link]

• Ciardi, John (1959). How Does a Poem Mean?. Cambridge, MA: The Riverside Press. 
• Drew, Elizabeth (1933). Discovering Poetry. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. 
• Harmon, William (2003). Classic Writings on Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press. 
• Hashmi, Alamgir (2011). "Eponymous Écriture and the Poetics of Reading a Transnational Epic". Dublin Quarterly, 15. 
• Hobsbaum, Philip (1996). Metre, Rhythm, and Verse Form. New York: Routledge. ISBN 0-415-12267-8. 
• Kinzie, Mary (1999). A Poet's Guide to Poetry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-43739-6. 
• Norman, Charles (1962). Poets on Poetry. New York: Collier Books.  Original texts from 8 English poets before the 20th Century and from 8 20th Century Americans.
• Oliver, Mary (1994). A Poetry Handbook. New York: Harcourt Brace & Co. ISBN 0-15-672400-6. 
• Oliver, Mary (1998). Rules for the Dance. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. ISBN 0-395-85086-X. 
• Pinsky, Robert (1999). The Sounds of Poetry. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN 0-374-52617-6. 
• Quinn, Arthur (1993). Figures of Speech. Hillsdale: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. ISBN 1-880393-02-6. 

This poetry-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. v t e

This biographical article needs additional citations for verification. Please help by adding reliable sources. Contentious material about living persons that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately, especially if potentially libelous or harmful. (May 2012)

Leslie Marmon Silko (born Leslie Marmon on March 5, 1948) is a Native American writer of the Laguna Pueblo tribe, and one of the key figures in the second wave of what Kenneth Lincoln has called the Native American Renaissance. She was one of the original recipients of the MacArthur Foundation Grant later known as the "Genius Grant" in 1981 and the Native Writers' Circle of the Americas Lifetime Achievement Award in 1994.^[1]

Early life[link]

She was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to photographer Leland Howard Marmon and Mary Virginia Leslie. Silko is 1/4^{[citation needed]} Laguna Pueblo Native American (a Keres speaking tribe), the rest of her ancestry being Anglo American and Mexican American. Her father is Lee Marmon, a noted photographer. As such, she grew up on the edge of pueblo society both literally – her family’s house was at the edge of the reservation – and figuratively, not being allowed to participate in various rituals or joi and aunts in the traditional stories of the Laguna people, and as a result always identified most strongly with the native part of her ancestry, saying in an interview with Alan Velie that "I am of mixed-breed ancestry, but what I know is Laguna".^[2]

She was educated at a Catholic school in Albuquerque, and went on to receive a BA from the University of New Mexico in 1969. She briefly attended law school before leaving to pursue her literary career.

In 1965, she married Richard C. Chapman, and together, they had a son, Robert Chapman, before divorcing in 1969. A subsequent marriage to John Silko in 1971 also ended in divorce.

Early literary work[link]

A short story written by Silko while still at school, "The Man To Send Rain Clouds", was published and quickly garnered a great deal of praise, winning its author a National Endowment for the Humanities Discovery Grant. The story is still frequently anthologised today. During the period 1968-1974, Silko wrote and published more short stories and many poems, most of which were later collected in her book Laguna Woman.

[edit] Ceremony

Leslie Marmon Silko's novel Ceremony was first published in 1977 to rave reviews. It remains the Native American novel which most often appears on college and university syllabi, and one of the few individual works by any Native author to have received book-length critical assessments.^{[citation needed]}

The novel tells the story of Tayo, a veteran of mixed ancestry returning from fighting against Japan in World War II. Returning to the poverty-stricken reservation at Laguna after a stint at the Los Angeles VA hospital, Tayo is recovering from "battle fatigue" (shell-shock), and is haunted by memories of his cousin, who died in the conflict when the two soldiers were forced to take part in the Bataan Death March of 1942. Seeking an escape from his pain, Tayo initially takes refuge in alcoholism. Gradually, helped by the mixed-blood shaman Betonie, he comes to a greater understanding of the world and his own place within it.

Ceremony has been called a Grail fiction, in that the hero overcomes a series of challenges to reach a specified goal; but this point of view has been criticized as Eurocentric, since it involves a Native American contextualizing backdrop, and not one based on European-American myths. The skill of the writer is evident in the way that it is also a book deeply rooted in traditional stories (for instance, there are several retellings of old stories). Fellow Pueblo poet Paula Gunn Allen criticized the book on this account, saying that Silko was divulging tribal secrets that she did not have the right to reveal.^[3]

In an America full of damaged Vietnam veterans, the book's message of healing and reconciliation between races and people made it both an immediate and a long-term success. It was largely on the strength of this work that critic Alan Velie named Silko one of his Four Native American Literary Masters, along with N. Scott Momaday, Gerald Vizenor and James Welch.

Other works[link]

Silko was not to publish another full-length novel for over a decade. In 1981, she brought out Storyteller, an interlinked collection of poems and short stories, and in 1986 she published Delicacy and Strength of Lace, a collected volume of her correspondence with her friend James Wright.

In the spring of 1981 she won John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation "Genius" Grant for $33,600 for each of five years. She quit her job teaching to write a sweeping 1,200-page novel about the American Indian set in the contemporary Southwest. During this period she struggled to complete the work, losing custody of her then 12-year old son to her ex-husband, while focusing on making films and writing.^[4]

It would take Silko 10 years to produce Almanac of the Dead, a massive volume published in 1991. This ambitious work received mixed reviews. The vision of the book stretched over both American continents and included Chiapas revolutionaries the Zapatista Army of National Liberation as just a small part of a mammoth cast of characters. Again taking the theme of conflict between white and Native as her theme, Silko substitutes what comes close to advocacy of violent revolution for her earlier works' stories of healing and forgiveness. Critiqued for its attitude towards homosexuality (several of the major villains are gay),^[5] and for a clumsy rendering of the Popol Vuh,^{[citation needed]} Almanac of the Dead has not achieved the same mainstream success as its predecessor.

A subsequent novel, Gardens in the Dunes (1999), weaves themes of women’s history, slavery, conquest and gardening.

Non-fiction works[link]

Long a commentator on Native American affairs, Silko has published many non-fictional articles on Native American affairs and literature.

Her two most famous essays are outspoken attacks on fellow writers. In "An Old-Fashioned Indian Attack in Two Parts", first published in Geary Hobson’s collection The Remembered Earth (1978), Silko accused Gary Snyder of profiting from Indian culture, particularly in his collection Turtle Island, the name and theme of which was taken from Pueblo mythology. In 1986, in a review of Anishinaabe writer Louise Erdrich's novel The Beet Queen entitled "Here’s an Odd Artifact for the Fairy-Tale Shelf", Silko claimed that the novelist had abandoned writing about the Native struggle for sovereignty in exchange for writing "self-referential", postmodern fiction.

In 2010, Silko released The Turquoise Ledge: A Memoir. Written using distinctive prose and overall structure influenced by Native American storytelling traditions, the book is a broad-ranging exploration not only of her Laguna Pueblo, Cherokee, Mexican and European family history but also of the natural world, suffering, insight, environmentalism and the sacred. The desert southwest setting is prominent. Although non-fiction, the stylized presentation is reminiscent of creative fiction.

In 2012, the textbook, Rethinking Columbus, which includes an essay by her, was banned by the Tucson Unified School District.^[6][7]

Bibliography[link]

Novels[link]

• Gardens in the Dunes. Simon and Schuster. 2000. ISBN 978-0-684-86332-0. http://books.google.com/books?id=JyeZLDQf4ZYC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Leslie+Marmon+Silko#v=onepage&q=&f=false. 
• Almanac of the Dead (1991)
• Ceremony. 1977.  reprint. San Val, Incorporated. 1986. ISBN 978-0-613-03297-1. 

Poetry and short story collections[link]

• Love poem and Slim Canyon (1996)
• Rain (1996)
• Sacred Water: Narratives and Pictures. Flood Plain Press. 1994. ISBN 978-0-9636554-0-0. 
• Storyteller (1981) reprint. Henry Holt & Company. 1988. ISBN 978-0-8050-0192-1. 
• Western Stories (1980)
• Laguna Women: Poems (1974)

Other[link]

• The Turquoise Ledge: A Memoir (2010)
• Ellen L. Arnold, ed. (2000). Conversations with Leslie Marmon Silko. University Press of Mississippi. ISBN 978-1-57806-301-7. http://books.google.com/books?id=DAJV925bmJoC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Leslie+Marmon+Silko#v=onepage&q=&f=false. 
• Yellow Woman and a Beauty of the Spirit: Essays on Native American Life Today. Simon and Schuster. 1997. ISBN 978-0-684-82707-0. http://books.google.com/books?id=Lq9IKuhf24MC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Leslie+Marmon+Silko#v=onepage&q=&f=false. 
• Melody Graulich, ed. (1993). Yellow woman. Rutgers University Press. ISBN 978-0-8135-2005-6. http://books.google.com/books?id=_lHxG0PWiJ8C&pg=PA161&lpg=PA161&dq=INDIAN+SONG:SURVIVAL&source=bl&ots=_d0xosRLXG&sig=wVr2HnjGp4RTD1yxZA4LT5AfNw4&hl=en&sa=X&ei=VkUUT_HcHNKmsALkl4SABA&sqi=2&ved=0CE4Q6AEwBg#v=onepage&q&f=false. 
• Delicacy And Strength of Lace Letters (1986)
• "Indian Song: Survival", Chicago Review, Vol. 24, No. 4 (Spring, 1973), pp. 94–96

See also[link]

Poetry portal

• List of writers from peoples indigenous to the Americas
• Native American Studies

References[link]

External links[link]

• Works by or about Leslie Marmon Silko in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Biography
• Voices from the Gaps biography
• "Leslie Marmon Silko" by Per Seyersted in the Western Writers Series Digital Editions at Boise State University
• "Leslie Marmon Silko - Q&A - AZ Ethnic Studies Ban", soundcloud
• KCRW Bookworm Interview

Gerald Robert Vizenor (born 1934) is a Native American (Anishinaabe) writer, and an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, White Earth Reservation. One of the most prolific Native American writers, with over 30 books to his name, Vizenor also taught for many years at the University of California, Berkeley, where he was Director of Native American Studies. Vizenor is currently Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, and Professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico.

Early life[link]

Gerald Vizenor’s father was murdered in an unsolved homicide when Vizenor himself was less than two years old.^[1] He was raised by his Anishinaabe grandmother, his Swedish American mother, and a succession of uncles in Minneapolis and the White Earth Reservation. Following the death of his informal stepfather, who had been his primary caregiver, Vizenor lied about his age to enter the Minnesota National Guard in 1950 at age 15. Honorably discharged before his unit went to Korea, Vizenor joined the army two years later, serving in a Japan still reeling from the impact of nuclear attack. This period would inspire his interest in haiku, and much later his 2004 "kabuki novel" Hiroshima Bugi.

Returning to America in 1953, Vizenor took advantage of G.I. Bill funding to start a degree at New York University: this was followed by additional postgraduate study at Harvard University and the University of Minnesota, where he also undertook graduate teaching. During this period he married and had a son.

Activism[link]

Between 1964 and 1968, Vizenor was a community advocate. During this time he served as director of the American Indian Employment and Guidance Center in Minneapolis, which brought him into close contact with dislocated Native Americans from reservations, many finding it profoundly difficult to survive in a culture of white racism and cheap alcohol. This period is the subject of his collection Wordarrows: Whites and Indians in the New Fur Trade, some of the stories in which were inspired by real events. Working with homeless and poor Natives may have been the reason that Vizenor looked askance at the emerging American Indian Movement (AIM), seeing radical leaders such as Dennis Banks and Clyde Bellecourt as being more concerned with personal publicity than the "real" problems faced by American Indians.

In this spirit, Vizenor began working as a staff reporter on the Minneapolis Tribune, quickly rising to become an editorial contributor. His investigation into the case of Thomas James White Hawk, while never pretending that White Hawk was innocent, raised difficult questions about the nature of justice in dealing with colonized peoples. It was credited with being the work that led to the death sentence on White Hawk being commuted.

During this period Vizenor coined the phrase “cultural schizophrenia” to describe the state of mind of many Natives torn between Native and White cultures. His investigative journalism into the activities of American Indian activists uncovered many instances of hypocrisy and drug dealing among the movement’s leaders, and earned him a number of death threats.

Teaching career[link]

Beginning teaching at Lake Forest College, Illinois, Vizenor was quickly appointed to set up and run the Native American Studies program at Bemidji State University. Later he was professor of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis^[2] (1978–1985), which he satirized mercilessly in his fictions.^[3] During this time he was also a visiting professor at Tianjin University, China. Following four years at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he was Provost of Kresge College, and an endowed chair for one year at the University of Oklahoma, Vizenor took up a professorship at the University of California, Berkeley. He is current professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico.

Fiction[link]

Vizenor has published collections of haiku, poems, plays, short stories, translations of traditional tribal tales, screenplays and of course many novels. He has been named as a member of the literary movement Kenneth Lincoln dubbed the Native American Renaissance.^[4] His first novel, Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart (1978), later revised as Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles (1990), brought him immediate attention. One of few science fiction novels by a Native American, it portrayed a procession of tribal pilgrims through a surreal, dystopian landscape of an America suffering an environmental apocalypse brought on by white greed for oil. Simultaneously postmodern and deeply traditional, inspired by N. Scott Momaday's pioneering works, Vizenor drew on poststructuralist theory and Anishinaabe trickster stories to portray a world in the grip of what he called “terminal creeds” – belief systems incapable of change.^{[citation needed]} In one of the most famous and controversial passages, the character Belladonna Darwin Winter-Catcher proclaims that Natives are better and purer than whites, and is killed for her belief in racial separatism with poisoned cookies.^{[citation needed]}

Subsequent novels have seen a shifting and overlapping cast of tricksters turn up anywhere from China to White Earth to the University of Kent. Frequently quoting philosophers such as Umberto Eco, Roland Barthes and Jean Baudrillard, Vizenor’s fiction is allusive, humorous and playful, but always ultimately serious in dealing with the state of Native America. Proclaiming himself as much the enemy of those who would romanticize the figure of the Native as he is of those who would continue colonial oppression, Vizenor constantly returns to the theme that the “Indian” was an invention of European invaders – before Columbus’ first landing, there was no such thing as an “Indian”, only the peoples of various tribes (such as Anishinaabe or Dakota).

To deconstruct the idea of "Indianness," Vizenor uses strategies of irony and jouissance. For instance, in the lead up to Columbus Day in 1992, he published The Heirs of Columbus, in which he teasingly claims that Columbus was in fact a Mayan Indian trying to return home. In Hotline Healers, he claims that Richard Nixon, the American president who did more for American Indians than any other, did so as part of a deal in exchange for traditional “virtual reality” technology.

Non-fiction[link]

Vizenor has authored several studies of Native American affairs, including Manifest Manners and Fugitive Poses, and in addition has edited several collections of academic work on Native American writing. He is the founder-editor of the American Indian Literature and Critical Studies series at the University of Oklahoma Press, which has provided an important venue for critical work on and by Native writers.

In his own full-length studies, Vizenor is concerned with deconstructing the semiotics of Indianness. For instance, the title of Fugitive Poses relates to Vizenor's assertion that the term indian is a social-science construction that replaces native peoples, who become absent or "fugitive".^[5] Similarly, the term "manifest manners" refers to the continued legacy of Manifest Destiny, especially the way native peoples are still bound by narratives of dominance that replace them with "indians".^[6][7] In place of a unified “Indian” signifier, he suggests that Native peoples be referred to as tribal, and always where possible put into their own particular tribal context. To discuss more general Native studies, he suggests using the term "postindian," which would get across the idea of disparate, heterogeneous tribal cultures unified only by Euro-American attitudes and actions towards them. Among his many other neologisms is “survivance”, a cross between the words "survival" and "resistance," which Vizenor uses as a replacement for “survival”, saying that it carries an implication of an ongoing, changing process, rather than the simple continuance of old ways into the modern world, and pointing out that for tribal peoples, the act of survival is based in resistance.

He continues to be critical of both Native American nationalism and Euro-American colonial attitudes.

Awards[link]

• American Book Award for Shrouds of White Earth, 2011.^[8]
• MELUS Lifetime Achievement Award, 2011.^[9]
• Distinguished Minnesotan, Bemidji State University, 2005
• Distinguished Achievement Award, Western Literature Association, 2005
• Lifetime Achievement Award, Native Writers' Circle of the Americas, 2001
• PEN Excellence Award, 1996
• PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, 1990^[10]
• Artists Fellowship in Literature, California Arts Council, 1989
• New York Fiction Collective Prize, 1988
• American Book Award, 1988
• New York Fiction Collective Award, 1986^[10]
• Best American Indian Film, San Francisco Film Festival, 1984^[10]
• Film-in-the-Cities Award, Sundance Festival, 1983

Bibliography[link]

Fiction[link]

• Shrouds of White Earth (SUNY P)
• Father Meme (U of New Mexico P)
• Hiroshima Bugi: Atomu 57 (Nebraska UP)
• Chancers (Oklahoma UP)
• Hotline Healers: An Almost Browne Novel (Wesleyan UP)
• Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles (Minnesota UP) (revised version of Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart)^[10]
• The Heirs of Columbus (Wesleyan UP)
• Griever: An American Monkey King in China (Minnesota UP)
• The Trickster of Liberty: Tribal Heirs to a Wild Baronage (Emergent Literatures)
• Earthdivers: Tribal Narratives on Mixed Descent (Minnesota UP)
• Landfill Meditation: Crossblood Stories (Wesleyan UP)
• Dead Voices: Natural Agonies In The New World (U. of Oklahoma Press)

Poetry[link]

• Almost Ashore (Salt Publishing, 2006)
• Bear Island: The War At Sugar Point (Minnesota UP, 2006)
• Empty Swings (Haiku in English Series) (Nodin Press)
• Matsushima (Pine Island Nodin Press, 1984)
• Raising the Moon Vines (Nodin Press)
• Seventeen Chirps (Nodin Press)
• Two Wings the Butterfly (privately printed)
• Water Striders (Moving Parts Press)
• Slight Abrasions: A Dialogue in Haiku, with Jerome Downes (Nodin Press)
• Summer in the Spring: Anishinaabe Lyric Poems and Stories (Oklahoma UP)
• South of the Painted Stones (1963)
• The Old Park Sleepers (1961)
• Poems Born in the Wind (1960)

Screenplays[link]

• Harold of Orange (1982)

Other works[link]

• Native Liberty: Natural Reason and Cultural Survivance (Nebraska UP, 2009)
• Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence (Nebraska UP, 1998)
• Shadow Distance: A Gerald Vizenor Reader (Wesleyan UP)
• Wordarrows: Indians and Whites in the New Fur Trade (Minnesota UP)
• Crossbloods; Bone Courts, Bingo, and Other Reports (Minnesota UP)
• Manifest Manners: Postindian Warriors of Survivance (Wesleyan UP) (later renamed Manifest Manners: Narratives on Postindian Survivance^[11]
• The Everlasting Sky; New Voices from the People Named the Chippewa (MacMillan)
• The People Named the Chippewa: Narrative Histories (Minnesota UP)
• Touchwood : A Collection of Ojibway Prose (Many Minnesotas Project, No 3) (New Rivers Press)
• Thomas James Whitehawk: Investigative Narrative in the Trial, Capital Punishment, and Commutation of the Death Sentence of Thomas James Whitehawk (Four Winds Press, 1968)

Edited anthology[link]

• Native American Literature: A Brief Introduction and Anthology (1997)

Edited collections of essays[link]

• Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence (Nebraska UP, 2008)
• Narrative Chance: Postmodern Discourse on Native American Indian Literatures (Oklahoma UP)

Autobiography[link]

• Interior Landscapes: Autobiographical Myths and Metaphors (Minnesota UP)
• Postindian Conversations, with A. Robert Lee (Nebraska UP)

Books about Gerald Vizenor[link]

• Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition, by Kimberley Blaeser
• Loosening the Seams: Interpretations of Gerald Vizenor, by A. Robert Lee
• Four American Indian Literary Masters: N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko and Gerald Vizenor, by Alan R. Velie
• Gerald Vizenor: Profils Americains 20, ed. Simone Pellerin. Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée, 2007. (In English)
• Gerald Vizenor: Texts and Contexts, ed. A. Robert Lee and Deborah Madsen, 2011.
• Understanding Gerald Vizenor, by Deborah Madsen, 2010.

Articles about Gerald Vizenor[link]

Anthologies[link]

• Visit Teepee Town: Native Writings After the Detours, Diane Glancy, Mark Nowak (Editors), Coffeehouse Press.
• Stories Migrating Home: Anishnaabe Prose, Kimberly Blaeser (Editor), Loonfeather Press: Wisconsin
• Talking Leaves: Contemporary Native American Short Stories, Craig Lesley, Katheryn Stavrakis (Editor) Dell Books
• Earth Song, Sky Spirit: Short Stories of the Contemporary Native American Experience, Clifford E. Trafzer (Editor)
• Earth Power Coming: Short Fiction in Native American Literature, Simon J. Ortiz (editor), Navajo Community College Press
• Songs from This Earth on Turtle's Back: An Anthology of Poetry by American Indian Writers, Joseph Bruchac (Editor), Greenfield Review Press
• Smoke Rising: The Native North American Literary Companion, Janet Witalec, Visible Ink Press.
• Words in the Blood: Contemporary Indian Writers of North and South America, Jamake Highwater (Editor), New American Library.
• Blue Dawn, Red Earth: New Native American Storytellers, Clifford E. Trafzer (Editor), Anchor Books
• The Lightning Within: An Anthology of Contemporary American Indian Fiction, Edited and with an Introduction by Alan R. Velie, University of Nebraska Press.
• American Indian Literature: An Anthology, Alan R. Velie, University of Oklahoma Press.
• Harper's Anthology of 20th century Native American Poetry, Duane Niatum (Editor) HarperCollins
• Twenty Six Minnesota Writers, Monico D. Degrazia (Editor), Nodin Press.
• After Yesterday's Crash: The Avant-Pop Anthology, Larry McCaffery (Editor), Penguin USA
• The New Native American Novel: Works in Progress, Mary Bartlett (Editor), University of New Mexico Press.
• The Writer's Notebook, Howard Junker, HarperCollins.
• Listening to Ourselves: More Stories from 'the Sound of Writing', Alan Cheuse, Caroline Marshall (Editor), Anchor Books.
• Avant-Pop: Fiction for a Daydream Nation, Larry McCaffery (Editor), Fc2/Black Ice Books
• Before Columbus Foundation Fiction Anthology: Selections from the American Book Awards 1980–1990, Ishmael Reed, Kathryn Trueblood, Shawn Wong (Editor), W W Norton & Co.
• Without Discovery: A Native Response to Columbus (Turning Point Series), Ray Gonzalez (Editor), Broken Moon Press.
• A Gathering of Flowers: Stories About Being Young in America, Joyce Carol Thomas (Editor), Harpercollins Juvenile Books.
• American Short Fiction, Spring 1991 by Laura Furman, University of Texas Press.
• An Illuminated History of the Future by Curtis White (Editor), Fc2/Black Ice Books.
• Fiction International, San Diego State University Press.
• An Other Tongue: Nation and Ethnicity in the Linguistic Borderlands, Alfred Arteaga (Editor), Duke University Press.
• Contemporary Archaeology in Theory, (Social Archaeology), Robert Preucel (Editor), Ian Hodder (Editor), Blackwell Pub.
• Encyclopedia of North American Indians, by Frederick E. Hoxie (Editor), Houghton Mifflin Co.
• A Companion to American Thought (Blackwell Reference), Richard Wightman Fox (Editor), James T. Kloppenberg (Editor), Blackwell Pub.
• Culture and the Imagination, Proceedings of the Third Stuttgart Seminar on Cultural Studies, Verlag Für Wissenschaft und Forschung, Stuttgart, Germany, 1995
• From Different Shores: Perspectives on Race and Ethnicity in America, Ronald Takaki (Editor), Oxford University Press.

Published interviews with or essays on Gerald Vizenor[link]

• Contemporary Authors: Biography – Vizenor, Gerald Robert (1934–), Thomson Gale.
• Other Words: American Indian Literature, Law, and Culture, (American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series), Jace Weaver, Univ. Oklahoma Press.
• Postindian Conversations, Gerald Robert Vizenor, A. Robert Lee, University of Nebraska Press.
• Excavating Voices: Listening to Photographs of Native Americans, Michael Katakis (Editor), University of Pennsylvania Museum Press.
• Mythic Rage and Laughter: An Interview with Gerald Vizenor, Dallas Miller, 1995, Studies in American Indian Literatures, 7, 77, 1995 Spring.
• Subverting the Dominant Paradigm: Gerald Vizenor's Trickster Discourse, Kerstin Schmidt, Studies in American Indian Literatures, 7, 65, 1995 Spring.
• That the People Might Live: Native American Literatures and Native American Community, Jace Weaver, Oxford University Press.
• Text as trickster: postmodern language games in Gerald Vizenor's 'Bearheart.' (Maskers and Tricksters), An article from: MELUS, by Elizabeth Blair
• Gerald Vizenor and his 'Heirs of Columbus': a postmodern quest for more discourse. An article from: The American Indian Quarterly by Barry E Laga
• Monkey kings and mojo: postmodern ethnic humor in Kingston, Reed, and Vizenor, An article from: MELUS, by John Lowe
• Postmodern bears in the texts of Gerald Vizenor (Critical Essay), An article from: MELUS, by Nora Baker Barry
• "Bad Breath": Gerald Vizenor's Lacanian fable. (Critical Essay), An article from: Studies in Short Fiction by Linda Lizut Helstern
• Native American Writers of the United States, (Dictionary of Literary Biography, V. 175), Kenneth M. Roemer (Editor), Gale Research.
• Woodland word warrior: An introduction to the works of Gerald Vizenor, A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff.
• Survival This Way: Interviews With American Indian Poets, Joseph Bruchac III (Editor), (Sun Tracks Books, No 15) University of Arizona Press.
• Winged Words: American Indian Writers Speak, Laura Coltelli, University of Nebraska Press.
• Partial Recall: With Essays on Photographs of Native North Americans, Lucy Lippard (Editor)
• Contemporary Authors. Autobiography Series (Vol 22. Issn 0748-0636), Gale Research
• American Contradictions: Interviews With Nine American Writers, Wolfgang Binder (Editor), Helmbrecht Breinig (Editor), Wesleyan University Press.
  • First published in German as Facing America, Multikulturelle Literatur def heutigen USA in Texten und Interviews, Rotpunktverlag, Leipzig, Germany, 1994.
• Native American Autobiography: An Anthology (Wisconsin Studies in American Autobiography), Arnold Krupat (Editor), University of Wisconsin Press.
• Growing Up in Minnesota: Ten Writers Remember Their Childhoods, Chester G. Anderson, University of Minnesota Press.
• Inheriting the Land: Contemporary Voices from the Midwest, Mark Vinz (Editor), Thom Tammaro (Editor), University of Minnesota Press.
• Gerald Vizenor, a special edition, Louis Owens (Editor), Studies in American Indian Literatures, Volume 9, Number 1, Spring 1997, including:
  • "Interior Dancers": Transformations of Vizenor's Poetic Vision, Kimberly M. Blaeser
  • The Ceded Landscape of Gerald Vizenor's Fiction, Chris LaLonde
  • Blue Smoke and Mirrors: Griever's Buddhist Heart, Linda Lizut Helstern
  • Liberation and Identity: Bearing the Heart of The Heirship Chronicles, Andrew McClure
  • Liminal Landscapes: Motion, Perspective and Place in Gerald Vizenor's Fiction, Bradley John Monsma
  • Waiting for Ishi: Gerald Vizenor's Ishi and the Wood Ducks and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Elvira Pulitano
  • Doubling in Gerald Vizenor's Bearheart: The Pilgrimage Strategy or Bunyan Revisited, Bernadette Rigel-Cellard
  • Legal and Tribal Identity in Gerald Vizenor's The Heirs of Columbus, Stephen D. Osborne
• Other Destinies: Understanding the American Indian Novel, (American Indian Literature and Critical Studies, Vol 3), Louis Owens, University of Oklahoma Press.
• Mediation in Contemporary Native American Fiction (American Indian Literature and Critical Studies, Vol 15), James Ruppert, University of Oklahoma Press.
• Native American Perspectives on Literature and History, (American Indian Literature and Critical Studies Series, Vol 19) by Alan R. Velie (Editor), University of Oklahoma Press.
  • (Articles by Rodriguez, Velie and Blaeser address Vizenor's writings.)
• The Turn to the Native, by Arnold Krupat, University of Nebraska Press.
• Cultural Difference and the Literary Text: Pluralism and the Limits of Authenticity in North American Literatures, Edited by Winfried Siemerling and Katrin Schwenk
• I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers, Brian Swann, Arnold Krupat, Brompton Books Corp.
• Buried Roots and Indestructible Seeds: The Survival of American Indian Life in Story, History, and Spirit, Martin Zanger (Editor), Mark A. Lindquist, University of Wisconsin Press.
• Sacred Trusts: Essays on Stewardship and Responsibility, Michael Katakis, Russell Chatham (Illustrator), Mercury House.
• Native American Testimony: A Chronicle of Indian-White Relations from Prophecy to Present, 1492–1992, Peter Nabokov, Penguin USA
• Out There: Marginalization and Contemporary Cultures, Russell Ferguson, Martha Gever, Mit Press.
• Listening to Native Americans: Making Peace with the Past for the Future, John Barry Ryan, in Listening: Journal of Religion and Culture, Vol. 31, No.1 Winter 1996 pp. 24–36.
• Transformation in Progress by Annalee Newitz and Jillian Sandell, in Bad Subjects, an online journal.
• Spring Wind Rising: The American Indian Novel and the Problem of History, Stripes, James D., A dissertation.

Textbooks[link]

• The McGraw-Hill Introduction to Literature, Gilbert H. Muller, McGraw Hill Text.
• Ways in: Approaches to Reading and Writing About Literature, Gilbert H. Muller, John A. Williams, McGraw Hill Text.
• The Harper American Literature, Volume 1; 2nd Edition, Donald McQuade, Robert Atwan, Martha Banta, Justin Kaplan, Harpercollins College Div.

Writing available online[link]

Almost Ashore from the Salt Publishing site, including a video clip and audio of Vizenor reading the following poems:

• Blue Horses
• Choir of Memory
• Depot Graves
• Guthrie Theater
• Huffy Henry
• Paul Celan
• Raising the Flag
• September Light
• White Earth

Stone Babies from Weber Studies

Gerald Vizenor in Dialogue with A. Robert Lee from Weber Studies

See also[link]

Poetry portal

• List of thinkers influenced by deconstruction

Notes[link]

• This article incorporates text from Nativewiki under the GFDL license.

External links[link]

• Works by or about Gerald Vizenor in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Official Gerald Vizenor site
• Salt Publishing website for Almost Ashore – includes video footage, excerpts and biography
• Gerald Vizenor at the Minnesota Authors Biography Project
• Gerald Vizenor at the Native American Authors Project
• Interview with “The Berkleyan”
• In conversation with A. Robert Lee
• Vizenor’s academic resume. (NB this is not up-to-date)
• Talk at University of Minnesota 2006

This article may require cleanup to meet Wikipedia's quality standards. No cleanup reason has been specified. Please help improve this article if you can; the talk page may contain suggestions. (March 2010)

Judith Butler

Butler during a lecture at the University of Hamburg. April 2007
Born	(1956-02-24) February 24, 1956 (age 56) Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.
Era	20th / 21st-century philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Continental philosophy, Third-wave feminism, Critical theory, Queer theory, Postmodernism, Post-structuralism
Main interests	Feminist theory, Political philosophy, Ethics, Psychoanalysis, Discourse, Embodiment, Sexuality, Jewish philosophy
Notable ideas	Sex and gender as social construction, Gender performativity
Influenced by Michel Foucault, Theodor Adorno, J.L. Austin, Luce Irigaray, Gayle Rubin, Monique Wittig, Emmanuel Lévinas, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Simone de Beauvoir, Claude Lévi-Strauss
Influenced Eve Sedgwick, Michael Warner, Judith Halberstam, José Muñoz, Lauren Berlant, Kate Bornstein Grace Ji-Sun Kim

Judith Butler (born February 24, 1956) is an American post-structuralist philosopher, who has contributed to the fields of feminism, queer theory, political philosophy, and ethics. She is a professor in the Rhetoric and Comparative Literature departments at the University of California, Berkeley. Butler received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale University in 1984, for a dissertation subsequently published as Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France. In the late-1980s she held several teaching/research appointments, and was involved in "post-structuralist" efforts within Western feminist theory to question the "presuppositional terms" of feminism.

Her research ranges from literary theory, modern philosophical fiction, feminist and sexuality studies, to 19th- and 20th-century European literature and philosophy, Kafka^[1] and loss, mourning and war.^[2] Her most recent work focuses on Jewish philosophy, exploring pre- and post-Zionist criticisms of state violence.^[3][4] Politically, she is a strong supporter of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions against Israel.^[5]

Biography[link]

Butler was born in Cleveland, Ohio ^[2] to a family of Hungarian and Russian ancestry.^[6] Her mother was raised in Orthodox Judaism, later turning to Conservative Judaism, and finally to Reform Judaism; Butler's father belonged to a Reform Synagogue since his childhood.^[5] As a child and teenager, she attended both Hebrew school and special classes on Jewish ethics where she received her "first training in philosophy." ^[5][7] Butler stated in a 2010 interview with Haaretz that she began the ethics classes at the age of 14 and that they were created as a form of punishment by her Hebrew school's Rabbi because she was "too talkative in class," "talk[ed] back," and was "not well behaved."^[5] Butler also stated that she was "thrilled" by the classes and chose to focus on Martin Buber. She also encountered the writings of Kant, Hegel, and Spinoza during these special sessions.^[5]

Butler attended Bennington College and then Yale University^[8] where she studied philosophy, receiving her B.A. in 1978 and her Ph.D. in 1984.^[9] Her dissertation was subsequently published as Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France (1987).^[10] In Butler’s dissertation, she attempts to understand how gender comes into being and how gender comes to be seen as something naturally occurring rather than historical. Butler points out that it is possible for a person to choose the gender they desire to be, but society prevents us from choosing no gender.^[11]

She taught at Wesleyan University, George Washington University, and Johns Hopkins University before joining U.C. Berkeley in 1993.^[2] She will join the department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University as a visiting professor in the spring semesters of 2012 and 2013 and has the option of remaining as full time faculty.^[12][13][14] In 2009 she received the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation’s Distinguished Achievement Award for her contributions to humanistic inquiry. The prize money of $1.5 million is supposed to enable the recipients to teach and research under especially favorable conditions.^[2][15] Since 2006 Judith Butler has been the Hannah Arendt Professor of philosophy at the European Graduate School (EGS) in Switzerland.^[7] She sits on the Advisory Board of the academic journal Identities: Journal for Politics, Gender and Culture.^[16] Butler is also working on critiquing ethical violence and trying to formulate a theory of responsibility “for an opaque subject that works with Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault and Fredrich Nietzsche”.^[8]

Personal life[link]

Butler currently lives with her partner, the political scientist Wendy Brown. Butler identifies as an anti-Zionist Jew and is a critic of Israeli politics.^[17]

Overview of works[link]

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[edit] Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990)

Gender Trouble was first published in 1990, selling over 100,000 copies internationally and in different languages^{[citation needed]}. Alluding to the similarly named 1974 John Waters film Female Trouble starring the drag queen Divine,^[18] Gender Trouble critically discusses the works of Simone de Beauvoir, Julia Kristeva, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, Monique Wittig, Jacques Derrida, and, most significantly, Michel Foucault. The book has also enjoyed widespread popularity outside of traditional academic circles, even inspiring an intellectual fanzine, Judy!^[19]

The crux of Butler's argument in Gender Trouble is that the coherence of the categories of sex, gender, and sexuality—the natural-seeming coherence, for example, of masculine gender and heterosexual desire in male bodies—is culturally constructed through the repetition of stylized acts in time. These stylized bodily acts, in their repetition, establish the appearance of an essential, ontological "core" gender.^{[citation needed]} This is the sense in which Butler famously theorizes gender, along with sex and sexuality, as performative. The performance of gender, sex, and sexuality, however, is not a voluntary choice for Butler, who locates the construction of the gendered, sexed, desiring subject within what she calls, borrowing from Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, "regulative discourses." These, also called "frameworks of intelligibility" or "disciplinary regimes," decide in advance what possibilities of sex, gender, and sexuality are socially permitted to appear as coherent or "natural."^{[citation needed]} Regulative discourse includes within it disciplinary techniques which, by coercing subjects to perform specific stylized actions, maintain the appearance in those subjects of the "core" gender, sex and sexuality the discourse itself produces.^[20]

A significant yet sometimes overlooked part of Butler's argument concerns the role of sex in the construction of "natural" or coherent gender and sexuality. Butler explicitly challenges biological accounts of binary sex, reconceiving the sexed body as itself culturally constructed by regulative discourse.^[21] The supposed obviousness of sex as a natural biological fact attests to how deeply its production in discourse is concealed. The sexed body, once established as a “natural” and unquestioned “fact,” is the alibi for constructions of gender and sexuality, unavoidably more cultural in their appearance, which can purport to be the just-as-natural expressions or consequences of a more fundamental sex. On Butler’s account, it is on the basis of the construction of natural binary sex that binary gender and heterosexuality are likewise constructed as natural.^[22] In this way, Butler claims that without a critique of sex as produced by discourse, the sex/gender distinction as a feminist strategy for contesting constructions of binary asymmetric gender and compulsory heterosexuality will be ineffective.^[23]

Thus, by showing both terms “gender “and “sex” as socially and culturally constructed, Butler offers a critique of both terms, even as they have been used by feminists.^[24] Butler argued that feminism made a mistake in trying to make “women” a discrete, ahistorical group with common characteristics. Butler said this approach reinforces the binary view of gender relations because it allows for two distinct categories: men and women.^[8] Butler believes that feminists should not try to define “women” and she also believes that feminists should “focus on providing an account of how power functions and shapes our understandings of womanhood not only in the society at large but also within the feminist movement”.^[25] Finally, Butler aims to break the supposed links between sex and gender so that gender and desire can be “flexible, free floating and not caused by other stable factors”.^[8] The idea of identity as free and flexible and gender as a performance, not an essence, is one of the foundations of Queer Theory.^[8]

[edit] Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" (1993)

Bodies That Matter seeks to clear up readings and supposed misreadings of performativity that view the enactment of sex/gender as a daily choice.^[26] To do this, Butler emphasizes the role of repetition in performativity, making use of Derrida's theory of iterability, a form of citationality, to work out a theory of performativity in terms of iterability:

Performativity cannot be understood outside of a process of iterability, a regularized and constrained repetition of norms. And this repetition is not performed by a subject; this repetition is what enables a subject and constitutes the temporal condition for the subject. This iterability implies that 'performance' is not a singular 'act' or event, but a ritualized production, a ritual reiterated under and through constraint, under and through the force of prohibition and taboo, with the threat of ostracism and even death controlling and compelling the shape of the production, but not, I will insist, determining it fully in advance.^[27]

Iterability, in its endless undeterminedness as to-be-determinedness, is thus precisely that aspect of performativity that makes the production of the "natural" sexed, gendered, heterosexual subject possible, while also and at the same time opening that subject up to the possibility of its incoherence and contestation.^[jargon]

[edit] Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (1997)

In Excitable Speech, Butler surveys the problems of hate speech and censorship. She argues that censorship is difficult to evaluate, and that in some cases it may be useful or even necessary, while in others it may be worse than tolerance.^{[citation needed]} She develops a new conception of censorship’s complex workings, supplanting the myth of the independent subject who wields the power to censor with a theory of censorship as an effect of state power and, more primordially, as the condition of language and discourse itself.^{[citation needed]}

Butler argues that hate speech exists retrospectively, only after being declared such by state authorities. In this way, the state reserves for itself the power to define hate speech and, conversely, the limits of acceptable discourse. In this connection, Butler criticizes feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon's argument against pornography for its unquestioning acceptance of the state’s power to censor.^{[citation needed]}

Deploying Foucault’s argument from The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, Butler claims that any attempt at censorship, legal or otherwise, necessarily propagates the very language it seeks to forbid.^[28] As Foucault argues, for example, the strict sexual mores of 19th century Western Europe did nothing but amplify the discourse of sexuality it sought to control.^[29] Extending this argument using Derrida and Lacan, Butler claims that censorship is primitive to language, and that the linguistic “I” is a mere effect of an originary censorship. In this way, Butler questions the possibility of any genuinely oppositional discourse; "If speech depends upon censorship, then the principle that one might seek to oppose is at once the formative principle of oppositional speech".^[30]

Butler also questions the efficacy of censorship on the grounds that hate speech is context-dependent. Citing J.L. Austin's concept of the performative utterance, Butler notes that words’ ability to “do things” makes hate speech possible but also at the same time dependent on its specific embodied context.^{[citation needed]} Austin’s claim that what a word “does,” its illocutionary force, varies with the context in which it is uttered implies that it is impossible to adequately define the performative meanings of words, including hate, abstractly.^{[citation needed]} On this basis, Butler rejects arguments like Richard Delgado’s which justify the censorship of certain specific words by claiming the use of those words constitutes hate speech in any context. In this way, Butler underlines the difficulty inherent in efforts to systematically identify hate speech.

[edit] Undoing Gender (2004)

Undoing Gender collects Butler's reflections on gender, sex, sexuality, psychoanalysis and the medical treatment of intersex people for a more general readership than many of her other books. Butler revisits and refines her notion of performativity and focuses on the question of undoing "restrictively normative conceptions of sexual and gendered life".

Butler discusses how gender is performed without one being conscious of it, but says that it does not mean this performativity is "automatic or mechanical". She argues that we have desires that do not originate from our personhood, but rather, from social norms. The writer also debates our notions of "human" and "less-than-human" and how these culturally imposed ideas can keep one from having a "viable life" as the biggest concerns are usually about whether a person will be accepted if his or her desires differ from normality. She states that one may feel the need of being recognized in order to live, but that at the same time, the conditions to be recognized make life "unlivable". The writer proposes an interrogation of such conditions so that people who resist them may have more possibilities of living.^[31]

In her discussion of intersex, Butler addresses the case of David Reimer, a person whose sex was medically "reassigned" from male to female after a botched circumcision at eight months of age. Reimer was "made" female by doctors, but later in life identified as "really" male, married and became a stepfather to his wife's 3 children, and went on to tell his story in As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl which he wrote with John Colapinto. Reimer committed suicide in 2004.^[32]

[edit] Giving an Account of Oneself (2005)

In Giving an Account of Oneself, Butler develops an ethics based on the opacity of the subject to itself; in other words, the limits of self-knowledge. Primarily borrowing from Theodor Adorno, Michel Foucault, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean Laplanche, Adriana Cavarero and Emmanuel Levinas, Butler develops a theory of the formation of the subject. She theorizes the subject in relation to the social – a community of others and their norms – which is beyond the control of the subject it forms, as precisely the very condition of that subject’s formation, the resources by which the subject becomes recognizably human, a grammatical "I", in the first place.

Butler accepts the claim that if the subject is opaque to itself the limitations of its free ethical responsibility and obligations are due to the limits of narrative, presuppositions of language and projection. "You may think that I am in fact telling a story about the prehistory of the subject, one that I have been arguing cannot be told. There are two responses to this objection. (1) That there is no final or adequate narrative reconstruction of the prehistory of the speaking "I" does not mean we cannot narrate it; it only means that at the moment when we narrate we become speculative philosophers or fiction writers. (2) This prehistory has never stopped happening and, as such, is not a prehistory in any chronological sense. It is not done with, over, relegated to a past, which then becomes part of a causal or narrative reconstruction of the self. On the contrary, that prehistory interrupts the story I have to give of myself, makes every account of myself partial and failed, and constitutes, in a way, my failure to be fully accountable for my actions, my final "irresponsibility," one for which I may be forgiven only because I could not do otherwise. This not being able to do otherwise is our common predicament" (page 78).

Instead she argues for an ethics based precisely on the limits of self-knowledge as the limits of responsibility itself.^{[citation needed]} Any concept of responsibility which demands the full transparency of the self to itself, an entirely accountable self, necessarily does violence to the opacity which marks the constitution of the self it addresses. The scene of address by which responsibility is enabled is always already a relation between subjects who are variably opaque to themselves and to each other. The ethics that Butler envisions is therefore one in which the responsible self knows the limits of its knowing, recognizes the limits of its capacity to give an account of itself to others, and respects those limits as symptomatically human.^{[citation needed]} To take seriously one's opacity to oneself in ethical deliberation means then to critically interrogate the social world in which one comes to be human in the first place and which remains precisely that which one cannot know about oneself. In this way, Butler locates social and political critique at the core of ethical practice.^{[citation needed]}

Reception[link]

Many scholars have praised Butler's work. She has been referred to as "a big-deal academic, ... and oft-cited academic superstar",^[33] "the most famous feminist philosopher in the United States," "the queer theorist par excellence," and "the most brilliantly eclectic theorist of sexuality in recent years."^[34] In addition, Lois McNay argues that, "Butler's work has influenced feminist understandings of gender identity (1999: 175)."^[34] Others, such as Susan A. Speer and Jonathan Potter claim that her research has given new insight in several areas, especially in the concept of heterosexism. However, although Speer and Potter find Butler’s work useful in this respect, they find her work too abstract to be usefully applied to “real-life situations.” For this reason, they pair a reading of Butler with Discursive psychology in order to extend Butler’s ideas to real-world scenarios.^[35]

Others are more critical. Susan Bordo has chastised Butler for reducing gender to language, arguing that the body is a major part of gender, thus implicitly opposing her conception of gender as performed.^[36] Peter Digeser argues that Butler’s idea of performativity is too pure to account for identity. Digeser doubts that pure performativity is possible, suggesting that in viewing the gendered individual as purely performed, Butler ignores the gendered body, which Bordo also argues is extremely important. He also argues that neither an essentialist nor a performative notion of gender should be used in the political sphere, as both simplify gender too much.^[37] Martha Nussbaum has argued that Butler misreads J.L. Austin's idea of performative utterance, makes erroneous legal claims, forecloses an essential site of resistance by repudiating pre-cultural agency, and provides no normative ethical theory to direct the subversive performances that Butler endorses.^[38] Finally, Nancy Fraser argued that Butler’s focus on performativity has distanced her from “everyday ways of talking and thinking about ourselves … Why should we use such a self-distancing idiom?”^[39]

Commentary on style[link]

Butler has become famous in some circles for her "impenetrable, jargon-ridden prose,"^[40] which has also generated some controversy, according to Sara Salih, lecturer in English at the University of Kent at Canterbury.^[41] The author ascribes this to the fact that the concepts she writes about are "philosophically challenging, often ‘counter-intuitive’, and not always described in immediately accessible language."^[42]

Harvard professor Steven Pinker, has cited her work as an example of confused, Postmodernist writing that detracts from the public appreciation and support of art.^[43]

In 1998, Denis Dutton's journal Philosophy and Literature gave Butler First Prize in its "Bad Writing Competition," which claims to "celebrate bad writing from the most stylistically lamentable passages found in scholarly books and articles."^[44] Butler's 94 word long sentence, published in the journal Diacritics, for which she received the award was:

The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.

Dutton discontinued the contest after being criticized for its apparently hostile spirit.^[45] Butler responded to Dutton's criticism, with a letter to the London Review of Books and an op-ed piece for The New York Times. She argued that writing clearly can make the author too reliant on common sense and as such make language lose its potential to "shape the world" and shake up the status quo.^[46][47]

Stanley Kurtz, in turn, argued against Butler's op-ed in a letter to the New York Times titled, "Bad Writing Has No Defense."^[48] Stephen K. Roney also responded that "many—indeed, most—generally recognized “great thinkers” have been clear and lucid in their writing [...] Is Butler claiming to be deeper than all of them?"^[49]

Nussbaum's "The Professor of Parody" essay also raised the issue of Butler's style, calling it "ponderous and obscure" and "dense with allusions to other theorists, drawn from a wide range of different theoretical traditions...It bullies the reader into granting that, since one cannot figure out what is going on, there must be something significant going on, some complexity of thought, where in reality there are often familiar or even shopworn notions, addressed too simply and too casually to add any new dimension of understanding."^[38]

In 1999, politically conservative literary journal The New Criterion cited Butler as one of a "triumvirate of absurd figures" including Homi K. Bhabha and Fredric Jameson, for bad writing.^[50]

Political activism[link]

In "No, It's Not Anti-Semitic," an August 2003 article published in the London Review of Books, Butler argued against statements by Harvard President Lawrence Summers who suggested that certain forms of criticism of Israeli policies is a form of anti-semitism. She responded by stating that it "will not do to equate Jews with Zionists or Jewishness with Zionism" and argued against the notion that Jews such as herself who were critical of Israeli policies are "self-hating." She also referred to Post-Zionism as a "small but important" movement in Israel. In addition, Butler also argued that, "a challenge to the right of Israel to exist can be construed as a challenge to the existence of the Jewish people only if one believes that Israel alone keeps the Jewish people alive or that all Jews invest their sense of perpetuity in the state of Israel in its current or traditional forms.” ^[51]

In a later 2004 article, "Jews and the Bi-National Vision," published in Logos: A Journal of Modern Society and Culture, Butler attributes this vision to the writings of Martin Buber.^[52] On September 7, 2006, Butler participated in a faculty-organized teach-in at the University of California, Berkeley, against the 2006 Lebanon War.^{[53][dead link]} Butler is also a strong supporter of the 2005 international economic campaign, BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions).^[5]

In June 2010 Judith Butler refused the Civil Courage Award (Zivilcouragepreis) of the Christopher Street Day Parade in Berlin, Germany at the award ceremony, citing racist comments on the part of organizers and a general failure of CSD organizations to distance themselves from racism, and from anti-Muslim excuses for war specifically. Criticizing the event's commercialism, she went on to name several groups who she commended as stronger opponents of "homophobia, transphobia, sexism, racism, and militarism".^[54]

In October 2011, Butler attended Occupy Wall Street and, in reference to calls for clarification of the protesters' demands, said, "People have asked, so what are the demands? What are the demands all of these people are making? Either they say there are no demands and that leaves your critics confused, or they say that the demands for social equality and economic justice are impossible demands. And the impossible demands, they say, are just not practical. If hope is an impossible demand, then we demand the impossible — that the right to shelter, food and employment are impossible demands, then we demand the impossible. If it is impossible to demand that those who profit from the recession redistribute their wealth and cease their greed, then yes, we demand the impossible." ^[55]

Publications (incomplete)[link]

• 2011: The question of gender : Joan W. Scott's critical feminism : ISBN 0-253-35636-9
• 2011: The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere : ISBN 0-231-15645-6
• 2009: Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? : ISBN 1-84467-333-2
• 2009: Is Critique Secular?: Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech : ISBN 0-9823294-1-5
• 2007: Who Sings the Nation-State?: Language, Politics, Belonging (with Gayatri Spivak) : ISBN 1-905422-57-1
• 2005: Giving An Account of Oneself : ISBN 0-8232-2504-6
• 2004: Undoing Gender : ISBN 0-415-96923-9
• 2004: Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence : ISBN 1-84467-544-0
• 2003: Kierkegaard's Speculative Despair in The age of German idealism (edited by Robert C. Solomon): ISBN 0-415-30878-X
• 2003: Women and Social Transformation (with Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim and Lidia Puigvert) : ISBN 0-8204-6708-1
• 2002: The Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages : ISBN 0-8047-4453-X
• 2002: Prejudicial Appearances: The Logic of American Antidiscrimination Law : ISBN 0-8223-2713-9
• 2000: Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (with Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek) : ISBN 1-85984-278-X
• 2000: Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life and Death : ISBN 0-231-11895-3
• 1997: The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection : ISBN 0-8047-2812-7
• 1997: Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative : ISBN 0-415-91587-2
• 1993: Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex" : ISBN 0-415-90365-3
• 1991: "Imitation and Gender Insubordination" in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay Theories (edited by Diana Fuss): ISBN 0-415-90237-1
• 1990: Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity : ISBN 0-415-38955-0
• 1987: Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France : ISBN 0-231-06451-9

Films and video lectures[link]

• Judith Butler. "Cohabitation, Universality and Remembrance" Birkbeck College, London. May 24, 2010 (Audio only)
• Judith Butler. "Hannah Arendt, Ethics, and Responsibility." European Graduate School. Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Video Lecture. 97 minutes. 2009
• Judith Butler and Giorgio Agamben. "Eichmann, Law and Justice." European Graduate School. Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Video Lecture. 71 minutes. 2009
• Judith Butler. "Quién le canta al estado- nación." Buenos Aires International Book Fair. (Feria Internacional del Libro). Buenos Aires, Argentine. Video Lecture. 81 minutes. 2009
• Paule Zadjermann. "Judith Butler: Philosophical Encounters of the Third Kind." DVD. 52 minutes. Color. 2007
• Judith Butler. "Primo Levi for the Present." European Graduate School. Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Video Lecture. 90 minutes. 2006
• Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler and Larry Rickels. "About Psychoanalysis." European Graduate School. Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Video Lecture. 29 minutes. 2006
• Avital Ronell and Judith Butler. "The Contemporaneity of Philosophy." European Graduate School. Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Video Lecture. 23 minutes. 2006

Selected honors and awards[link]

• 2010: "25 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World", Utne Reader^[56]
• 2008: Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement Award, University of California, Berkeley
• 2007: Elected a Member of the American Philosophical Society
• 2004: Brudner Prize, Yale University
• 2001: Rockefeller Fellowship^{[citation needed]}
• 1999: Guggenheim Fellowship^[2]
• 1998: The Philosophy and Literature Bad Writing Contest^[57]

References[link]

Further reading[link]

• Chambers, Samuel A. and Terrell Carver. ''Judith Butler and Political Theory: Troubling Politics. New York: Routledge, 2008. : ISBN 0-415-76382-7
• Cheah, Pheng, "Mattering," Diacritics, Volume 26, Number 1, Spring 1996, pp. 108–139.
• Kirby, Vicki. Judith Butler: Live Theory. London: Continuum, 2006. : ISBN 0-8264-6293-6
• Eldred, Michael, 'Metaphysics of Feminism: A Critical Note on Judith Butler's Gender Trouble' 2008.
• Salih, Sarah. The Judith Butler Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. : ISBN 0-631-22594-3
• —. ''Routledge Critical Thinkers: Judith Butler. New York: Routledge, 2002. : ISBN 0-415-21519-6
• Thiem, Annika. Unbecoming Subjects: Judith Butler, Moral Philosophy, and Critical Responsibility, Fordham University Press, 2008. : ISBN 0-8232-2899-1

External links[link]

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Judith Butler

• Biography – University of California, Berkeley
• Biography – European Graduate School
• Interview of Judith Butler about her new book "Frames of War" on New Statesman
• Interview with Judith Butler: “Gender is Extramoral”, Barcelona Metropolis, Summer 2008.(English)
• Review of "Giving an Account of Oneself. Ethical Violence and Responsibility", by Judith Butler, Barcelona Metropolis Autumn 2010. (English)
• "Dictionary of Literary Biography on Judith P. Butler (page 3)"
• Interview with Judith Butler about politics, economy, control societies, gender and identity (2011)
• Radio interview on Philosophy Talk

Luci Tapahonso
Luci Tapahonso at a poetry reading at Diné College 2011
Born	1953 Shiprock, New Mexico
Occupation	Writer, Professor

Luci Tapahonso is a Navajo poet and lecturer in Native American Studies.

Early life[link]

Born on the Navajo reservation, to Eugene Tapahonso (Tódichʼíinii), and Lucille Tapahonso, (Áshįįhí), Luci Tapahonso was raised in a traditional way along with 11 siblings. English was not spoken on the family farm, and Tapahonso learned it as a second tongue after her native Navajo. Following schooling at Navajo Methodist School in Farmington, New Mexico, and Shiprock High School, she began studies at the University of New Mexico. There she first met the novelist and poet Leslie Marmon Silko, who was a faculty member and who proved to be an important influence on Tapahonso's early writing. In 1982, Tapahonso gained her MA, and she has gone on to teach, first at New Mexico and later at the University of Kansas and now at the University of Arizona.

Writings[link]

Her first collection of poetry, assembled when she was still an undergraduate, was published in 1981, but did not make much impact. Following Silko's lead, Tapahonso's early work is often mystical and places much importance on the idea of the feminine as a source of power and balance in the world. She also frequently uses her family and childhood friends in her poetry. Several more collections followed, as well as many individual poems which have been anthologised in others' collections, activist literature, and writing in magazines.

Her 1993 collection Saánii Dahataal (the women are singing), written in Navajo and English, was the first to gain her an international reputation, a reputation then cemented by 1997's blue horses rush in.

Tapahonso's writing, unlike that of most Native American writers, is a translation from original work she has created in her tribe's native tongue. Her Navajo work includes original songs and chants designed for performance. For this reason, her English work is strongly rhythmic and uses syntactical structures unusual in English language poetry.

Awards[link]

• Lifetime Achievement Award, Native Writers' Circle of the Americas, 2006
• Wordcraft Circle Storyteller of the Year (Readings/Performance) Award, 1999
• Award for Best Poetry from the Mountains and Plain's Booksellers Association, 1998
• New Mexico Eminent Scholar award, New Mexico Commission of Higher Education, 1989
• Excellent Instructor Award, U. of New Mexico, 1985
• Southwestern Association of Indian Affairs Literature Fellowship, 1981

External links[link]

• Official Luci Tapahonso site
• Voices from the Gaps - includes bio, further links
• Internet Public Library - Native American Authors Project

See also[link]

Poetry portal

• List of writers from peoples indigenous to the Americas
• Native American Studies