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Reading Notes W2: Part A

General Introduction p. 1-13

California
·     Far removed from the centers of trade and government; linked by air and rail and asphalt to the rest of North America. 
·     Produced a distinct of body of writings a part of American lit. 
·     Writers familiar to California – Richard Henry Dana, Mary Austin, Robinson Jeffers, Raymond Chandler, John Steinbeck, Gerald Haslam, David Fine, Michael Kowalewski, Kevin Starr
·     Comtemporary writers – Pablo Tac, the Luiseño neophyte trained in Rome 1830s; Louise Amelia Smith Clappe, chronicled Gold Rush; John Rollin Ridge, first American Indian novelist; María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, first Mexican American novelist; (pg 1-2)
·     Pg 2 The adventures of Esplandian by Garcí Ordóñez de Montalvo
·     California is an island filled with gold (Montalvo’s vision)
·     California Dream: seldom been promoted by serious fiction and poetry. 
§ Influential books: The Emigrant’s Guide to Oregon and California by Ohio lawyer Lansford Hastings. 
·     Hastings: led the first wagon party west in 1842 and returned with visions of a California republic, like Texas, free from Mexican control and led by himself as president.
·     Counterpoint, playing under or against such promotional copy.
·     Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust(1939) 
·     Indian writers: Greg Sarris, William Penn, Wendy Rose, Louis Owens, Darryl Babe Wilson (of the Atsugewi/Atchumawi tribes)
Mapping
·     Pacific rim suggests a circle; locates the western shoreline not at the outer edge of European expansion – or rather, not only there – but also on a great wheel of peoples who surround a basin, an ocean whose shores touch the South Pacific, Asia, and Latin America. 
·     Geographical – cultural mix
·     California is a kind of borderland where continent meets the sea, where Asia meets America, where cultures and subcultures touch, collide, ignite and intermingle. 

Indian Beginnings
·     California indigenous tribes offers traces of what was once a rich and deep culture.
·     Tribes: Yurok, Mojave, Cahuilla
·     By the endo f 19thcentury – 16,000 indigenous people remained; survivors went underground.
·     Writers: Pablo Tac, T’tcetsa (Lucy Young), John Rollin Ridge, (Yellowbird), Sarah Winnemucca (Thocmetony)…poets, storytellers
·     Many languages
·     Myths and stories
o  To consider the myths, stories, and poems of the original peoples as an integral part of the canon of California literature raises questions about the nature of literature itself. (20)
o  American Indian oral tradition as literature also tests fundamental assumptions about individual authorship. (20)
§ Which is truly authentic?
§ Are they authentic in the terms of their tribe?
·     Ishi, last survivor of the Yahi Tribe
·     The Maidu creation muyth entered mainstream literature in 1902-1903, when Hanc’ibyjim, aka Tom Young, transmitted a cache of stories to Rolan B. Dixon on the Hunington Expedition, an Indian collection project.
·     Indian culture
o  Ceremonies were kept inside the circle, away from the outsider. 
o  Shielded and protected by their beliefs 
o  Mystery and power
o  Native language is decreasing as the years pass

The Creation (23-25)
·     Earth maker: Primordial being, Creator God
·     Coyote:Helper of Earth Initiate. Trickster god.
·     Creation (Earth raised out of water), creation of man from earth



Work Cited
Hicks, Jack. The Literature of California. Vol. 1, University of California Press, 2000.


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