Fictionality and Pleasure. Traces of a Practice of Fictionality in Medieval German Short Verse Narratives?

Introduction: Performing Emotions in the Arthurian World Raluca L. Radulescu The history of emotions has encompassed, for the past few decades, a plethora of fields, making a significant contribution to our understanding of earlier eras, including textual studies. It is now agreed that emotions are culturally and socially constructed. They inform behavior and attitudes within the private and the public sphere, hence reconstituting their significance in a moment that can be perceived to be truly locked in the past is no easy feat. On the one hand, the pressures of period-specific social norms and etiquette manifested themselves in the encoding of emotions in literary and other texts written in the medieval period. On the other, modern scholars point out that the interpretation of any form of pre-modern art must go beyond noting the gestures, looks, tone of voice, and myriad other manifestations of emotion in the written text, to focus on what these would have meant to their first audiences—both from a regulatory point of view (rules of conduct) and as deliberate or inadvertent deviations from the norms. The study of the intensity and nuances of feeling represented in texts surviving from the medieval period can thus assist with gaining deeper insight into the interpretative codes used by various audiences and recipients of these art forms in ways that tend to be very different from our modern understanding of emotion and its manifestations. Efforts to gain such insight need to start from delineating the ‘communities of feeling’—or, in Barbara Rosenwein’s pioneering term, ‘emotional communities’—that are organized around learning class-based forms of behavior (and emotion).1 Similarly, the multiple facets of education captured in manuals, treatises, and moralizing stories from saints’ lives to popular romance (Arthurian romance included), have to be scrutinized in order to engage with the complex pressure mechanisms that would guide the expression of emotion in both the private and the public spheres.2 While the study of all forms of emotional expression within the parameters of a specific reading community is desirable, approaching medieval Arthurian romance adds at least another layer to be considered: the pressures of a literary tradition that often refuses to offer alternative endings to the major stories on which it is founded. Arthurian romances written and circulating across [End Page 3] Europe from the twelfth century onwards testify to this resistance to change, while they also stand as evidence of the creativity of remanieurs and scribes in nuancing well-known story lines. The immediate effect of changes in such narratives is naturally the audience’s (emotional) response, be it in relation to the private emotions of love, or the broader considerations brought about by grand emotional gestures with a political import. Tailored as Arthurian romance remains to the cultural, economic, and political elites of its day, its witnesses in all the languages of medieval Europe attest to the endurance of interest in testing boundaries and the malleability of a literary form that prides itself in inspiring ideal qualities in its audience. The boundaries tested in romance—and particularly in the Arthurian tradition—include behavior and customs, social class and privilege, with a view to exposing difficult questions: gender and power relations in society, or pressures at the geographic, linguistic, or cultural borders (physical and imaginary) between the Arthurian world (situated as a ‘center’) and other systems and powers.3 While the study of emotions in earlier literature, and, more specifically, Arthurian romance, has broadened to encompass medical and philosophical tracts, educational and political treatises, and many other manifestations of codes in medieval society—including literary tradition—a conspicuous absence has been the material context in which texts survived and were transmitted: the medieval manuscript. Irrespective of the nature of any one codex that survives from the medieval period, the way in which texts were copied and, even more particularly, their collocation with other texts, be it by intent (usually much harder to establish with any degree of precision, if at all possible) or by accretion, speaks volumes about how audiences would have encountered them. Work on Arthurian (and non-Arthurian) romance has often focused on the presumed or known commissioners, authors, and audiences of high...

Literary practice is part of a family of social practices, including that of fictive story-telling, which can be characterized through their constitutive concepts and conventions. The concept of literature itself as well as the literary stance can be characterized and explained only with reference to this framework. The literary stance is an attitude made possible by the defining concepts and conventions of literary practice in the approach to a text. Only by using these concepts and conventions can the reader identify the features of a literary work construed as a literary work within the practice. This chapter looks at the concepts and conventions which define literary practice in order to explore the differences between the concepts of fiction and literature.

This article analyzes the problem of referentiality in the historical novel, based on a comparison between its classic and contemporary forms. The first section addresses the “mixture of history and invention” that, following Alessandro Manzoni, was the foremost characteristic of the realist historical novel. The next section discusses how the meta-historical novel of the second half of the 20th century - for example, Disgrace (J. M. Coetzee) and El entenado (Juan José Saer)-eclipsed the problem of referentiality by assuming that the historical novel should operate by its own procedures, and not those of history. The following sections discuss the referential turn in 21st century literary narratives, focusing on three novels: El material humano, by Rodrigo Rey Rosa; K. Relato de uma busca, by Bernardo Kucinski, and Jan Karski, by Yannick Haenel. The article concludes that the inversion of these two poles—from non-referentiality to the predominance of referentiality—is an unexpected facet of the elasticity of the concept (and practice) of fiction, which by denying itself ultimately enriches itself.

As the story of the novel moves into the modernist decades, it is especially necessary to guard against the progressive fallacy. For although writers constantly create new forms out of the perceived limitations of their predecessors, this does not necessarily imply, as it would in the natural sciences, that the new is an advance. Hence, while the present account focuses on major new directions in the idea and practice of fiction in the twentieth century, every variety of the novel that has been invented continues to be practised and, above all, the omniscient realist narrative, as developed over the two preceding centuries, remains a mainstay of the genre not just numerically but qualitatively. At the same time, as indicated in the preceding essays, the novel has at all times reflected on the ambiguity of its narrative premises which can be understood both as literary conventions and as extra-literary truth claims. And as the sense of a social whole becomes more problematic, so it matters more to determine what sort of truth the novel tells: historical, moral, poetic? All of the above, no doubt, but which most essentially? Is failure in one of them more damaging than in others? Does poetic power give dangerous conviction to historical falsehood? As such questions especially pressed themselves on European writers at the end of the nineteenth century, the literary imagination was frequently polarised into two contrary possibilities.

REVIEWS93 (Kalamazoo, 1995). She supplements the factual evidence provided by the marks and names in the books with a careful consideration of various other historical records, namely, wills and library records. Women, Reading, andPiety is an interesting and compelling study in several parts: in the first and last chapters, Erler provides an overview of English women's devotional reading, moving from institutional libraries and the exchange of books between nuns to the patterns ofwomen's religious reading in the first several decades of printing. At the centre of the book, Erler provides detailed descriptions of the overlapping reading practices, and social histories, ofseven book-owning and bookgiving late medieval English women, whose lives cross boundaries not just of lay and religious life, but also oforthodoxy and heterodoxy. Importantly, Erler's evidence and examples force readers to think across our own persistent historiographie and disciplinary boundaries of late medieval and early modern, manuscript and print, and this is a productive exercise, as her discussion shows. There are, however, some key gaps in the picture Erler provides, and though these gaps are acknowledged and accounted for, their absence is telling. First, Erler is only concerned with the religious books women read, and nothing else, and second, Erler's consideration of reading women lacks examples ofyoung married, or young unmarried but not religious, women. Both are explained by the frequency of a certain kind of record and the paucity of another: for instance, women of a certain age, class, and status (i.e. widows ofsome wealth) made wills, while young married women rarely seem to have done so, or were prohibited from doing so; and in the wills made by devout widows, they consistently chose to leave as testament to their life and memory books ofreligion (regardless ofwhatever else they might have read in their lives). Finally, it is worth noting that since Erler's study is focused on the material history ofbook ownership, her conclusions about women's reading are necessarily limited: questions ofpublic reading (fundamental to both religious and lay households) and the potential dissemination and movement of text-based learning distinct from actual reading ability (what Rebecca Krug has recently called 'literate practices') can not easily be deduced from this evidence. Nevertheless, this is an issue ofscope, not accuracy, and as Erler notes in her epilogue, a desired aim ofthis studywas 'the recovery ofquantifiable information about women's devotional books' (134). Erler has succeeded with this work, and provided her readers with a considered, highly detailed, frequently provocative, and undeniably important contribution to women's literary and social history. JACQUELINE JENKINS University of Calgary PHiLLIPA HARDMAN, ed., TheMatterofIdentity inMedievalRomance. Suffolk, England & Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2003. Pp. xi, 165. isbn: 0-85991-761-4. $70/£40. In The Matter ofIdentity in Medieval Romance, Phillipa Hardman has collected twelve essays originally presented at the seventh biennial Conference on Romance in Medieval England, held in Reading in April 2000. The authors adopt a wide 94ARTHURIANA range ofapproaches to insular texts, manuscripts, poets, and even publishers. Many place insular works within a historical framework and investigate both ties with and differences from continental works, most often Old French romances and Breton lays. The book provides an important body of research unified by geographical more than thematic or generic links. In fact, rather than focusing on medieval romance, as the title suggests, several authors question generic affiliations or investigate genres such as lays, narrative poems, hagiographical and historical works. Hardman suggests, both through the title and in her own introduction, that the essays provide an investigation of the theme 'identity.' She proffers a definition of identity, cleverly suggesting it be considered a 'Matter' in itself (likened to the 'Matters' ofRome, Troy, England etc.). However, her discussion ofthe term and of its potential application to romance becomes so broad that it could, conceivably, be applied to an analysis of almost any work of literature. Though several authors make a conscious 'nod' towards the theme (one feels that they were asked to make their papers 'fit' after being written), most present studies which often only 'obliquely,' as Hardman suggests concerning the paper ofMorgan Dickson, address the 'Matter of Identity.' The twelve essays vary widely in topic...

The doctoral dissertation “La brevedad inconmensurable: el aforismo hispanico en la epoca de la retuiteabilidad” focuses on the study of the aphorism and the short forms in the contemporary Hispanic literature, as well as it pretends to be an original and innovative contribution to the emerging field of the digital humanities and to the studies on cyberculture and twitterature. This work mainly analyses the contemporary aphoristic writing and the short fiction, covering a wide spectrum of authors and nano-literary practices that have arisen in Mexico and Spain in the last decades. Nevertheless, a continuous dialogue is established between this contemporary corpus (Eusebio Ruvalcaba, Armando Gonzalez Torres, Cristina Rivera Garza, Miguel Angel Arcas, Lorenzo Olivan, Manuel Neila, Benjamin Barajas, Ramon Eder, Andres Neuman, Rafael Argullol) and the modern tradition of the Hispanic aphorism (Antonio Machado, Jose Bergamin, Antonio Porchia or Ramon Gomez de la Serna). Furthermore, this approach is combined with a sustained theoretical reflection on the techno mediatic dimension of the network society, the cyberculture and the digital writing. Because of that, this proposal is nourished by the knowledge of online communication systems and the different ways in which the means of transmission have influenced literature. The second part of the dissertation focuses on the study of short literary forms in the age of Web 2.0, specially, the so-called “twitterature”: literary practices that explore the creative use of the social network Twitter. Introduced by a theoretical intermezzo about the concept of short fiction, this part proposes to study the “twitterary” practices of a remarkable generation of Mexican authors, who combine analogical publishing and digital production (Jose Luis Zarate, Alberto Chimal, Mauricio Montiel, Merlina Acevedo, Aurelio Asiain, among others), tracing its continuities with a series of Latin American precursors of the art of brevity.

How to best prepare teachers to work with diverse learners engaged in multiple and new literacies (Luke & Elkins, 1998; The New London Group, 1996) is a critical concern to teacher educators. In the 21st century, the face of literacy and the faces in K-12 classrooms will become increasingly diverse. Luke and Elkins (1998) point out, The texts and literate practices of everyday life are changing at an unprecedented and disorienting pace. This applies across a range of contexts, in urban or rural areas, the shifting borderlands of multilingual communities, postindustrial or newly industrializing nations, traditional neighborhoods, and the virtual communities of the Internet (p. 4). Even as these changes occur, the teaching force remains homogeneous (Banks, 1991; Haberman, 1989). Melnick and Zeichner (1998) note, Demographic projections suggest that, in the coming years, students in U.S. schools will be even increasingly different in background from their teachers, making the task of teacher education one of educating largely typical candidates--White, monolingual, middle class--to teach an increasingly diverse student body composed of many poor students of color (p. 88). Faced with these challenges, teacher education programs must change substantively to successfully prepare teachers for diverse classrooms. How and in what ways such changes should occur remain open questions. In this article, we describe one set of possible answers to these questions as we examine the curriculum of a course in a newly restructured master's of education (M. Ed.) certification program at the Ohio State University. A collaboration between the course instructor and a graduate student, the study brings together the reflections of the professor who designed and taught the course--a form of teacher research (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1993)--with those of a researcher reflecting as a participant observer. We bring our respective positionings as a White, female, assistant professor and a Latina, female, graduate student to bear as we explore the role of reading and writing literacy narratives in shaping preservice teachers' understandings about literacy pedagogy and multiculturalism. The Research Context The course under examination provides secondary M. Ed. certification students with an introduction to definitions of language, literacy, and culture, and to key issues underlying their fields of study--social studies, English language arts, and foreign and second language education. These issues include current understandings about language and learning, literacy, and instructional debates surrounding the teaching of language, literacy, and culture generally, and within more specific content areas. During the autumn 1997 class, we explored issues related to language in use: language and literacy in home, community, workplace, and school settings; the notion of multiple literacies; literacy and education in a democratic society; civic literacy, multicultural and global education; and critical views of learning and teaching. To contextualize the many theoretical and pedagogical issues that were explored, students wrote and shared three papers related to literacy including a personal literacy narrative in which they wrote an account of their coming into literacy or experiences with literacy. They also read a variety of literacy narratives (Eldred & Mortensen, 1992), written from multiple perspectives; they used these to frame their understandings of language, literacy, and culture more generally. Students in the course divided into self-selected reading groups and chose among book-length narratives such as Push, by Sapphire (1997); Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers, by Lois-Ann Yamanaka (1997); Always Running, by Luis Rodriguez (1993); Working in the Dark, by Jimmy Santiago Baca (1994); and Rivethead, by Ben Hamper (1986). All of the students also read Keith Gilyard's (1991) self-study, Voices of the Self and shorter narratives by Richard Rodriguez (1982), Frederick Douglass (1845), Harper Lee (1960), Amy Tan (1991), Maxine Hong-Kingston (1985), and Toni Cade Bambara (1972). …

Latinx Literature Unbound: Undoing Ethnic Expectation

Thomas HINTON. The Conte du Graal Cycle: Chretien de Troyes's Perceval, the Continuations, and French Arthurian Romance. Gallica 23. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2012. Pp. ix, 290. ISBN: 978-1-84384-285-9. $99.LUKE Sunderland. Old French Narrative Cycle: Heroism between Ethics and Morality. Gallicai5. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2010. Pp. xiii, 204. isbn: 978-1-84384-220-0. $90.leah tether. The Continuations of Chretien's Perceval: Content and Construction, Extension and Ending. Arthurian Studies 79. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2012. Pp. ix, 256. isbn: 978-1-84384-31600. $95.In addition to a shared focus on Old French chivalric narrative, these three releases from D.S. Brewer in the Gallica and Old French series have in common their positions as their authors' first published books of literary criticism. These volumes are concerned with core ideas in Old French literature-cyclicity, continuation, aesthetics, ethics, and the hero-and will be of potential interest for Arthuriana's readers as read-through volumes, broadly informing research notes and class lectures. Further, they will be an asset for personal and university library reference. Thomas Fdinton studies the development, authorship, and reception of Chretien's unfinished Conte du Graal (Perceval) and its Continuations as a cycle. Luke Sunderland considers cyclic aesthetics and the formation of the hero in the contexts of four Old French narratives, and Leah Tether, like Fdinton, turns to the Perceval and its Continuations, but she examines the texts to demonstrate a theoretical model of continuation viewed as a genre.Thomas Fdinton's study examines the place of the Perceval and its Continuations in the history and development of cyclicity and later Arthurian romance. Fdinton particularly interrogates the creation and reception of Chretien's texts as a unified cycle, arguing for its place in the evolutionary development of Arthurian romance though the century that follows and even into the genesis of the modern novel in the seventeenth century, an idea that Matilda Tomaryn Bruckner suggests in her 'Introduction' to Chretien Continued (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Fdinton organizes his work into four chapters and a highly serviceable set of appendices. Fdis stated aims are first, to provide an understanding of'cyclic aesthetics' and 'narrative aesthetics' in the Conte and its Continuations and second, to determine how audiences and authors of Arthurian romance were 'invited' to respond to the corpus as they encountered it. Hinton's critical goals are complementary in that authorial response to the invitation to continue the narrative creates the resulting 'aesthetic' from opposing, hierarchical narrative dynamics. Narrative proliferation, or movement away from the source (as the 'centrifugal aesthetic'), is countered by recurrent harkening back to the principal hero's biography (as the 'centripetal aesthetic'), resulting in narrative tension and coherence.Hinton addresses the ways in which Chretien's Conte and the Continuations respond to existing theoretical parameters and result in a narrative that is ultimately coherent, despite its fragmented chronological development and multiple authors. Providing a clear and concrete presentation of criteria for 'cycle' and 'cyclicity' and how these work in specific instances, Hinton agues for an early 'aesthetic of cyclicity' that drives the evolution of romance and works to establish the place and value of the Conte and its Continuations as a cycle in that evolution. The designation may be problematic, however, in that Chretien's Conte and its Continuations do not precisely fit the theoretical parameters, as Hinton acknowledges.In his first chapter, Hinton explores the distinctions between the First Continuation and the Second and the latter's influence on those that follow. Biography, with Perceval's development foremost, and 'interlace,' that allows movement through the adventures of knights other than Perceval, are catalysts for the 'narrative aesthetic' that Hinton soon styles a 'textual aesthetic' (29 ff)- Lucid critical readings and insights about the second continuator's modes and lapses populate much of this chapter, and Hinton's argument that the Second Continuation creates the cyclicity of the Chretien Conte corpus is insightful if not entirely convincing. …

PurposeThis study aims to explore the authentic questioning practices of English Language Arts teachers. Although language arts (LA) education emphasizes the value of authentic questions in discussions about literature, teachers still tend to ask known-answer questions that guide students toward one literary interpretation. However, outside their classrooms, teachers talk about literary texts from stances of openness and curiosity. Helping teachers recognize and draw on their out-of-school literary practices might help them disrupt entrenched known-answer discourses. The authors studied how the same teachers asked questions about literature in different settings. The authors asked: To what degree and in what ways did teachers’ questions about literature change when they took on different roles in discussions of literature?Design/methodology/approachDrawing on theories of classroom discourses and everyday practices, this study compared and analyzed types of questions asked by high school teachers as they took on three roles: teacher in the high school classroom, discussion leader in a professional development and everyday reader in discussion.FindingsAnalysis showed that as participants moved further away from their teacher role, they were more likely to ask authentic, curiosity-driven questions that engaged fellow readers in exploratory, dialogic interpretation. They were less likely to attempt to maintain authority over students’ interpretations.Research limitations/implicationsThe authors hope researchers will build on these explorations of teacher stances and language in different roles, so we can work toward disrupt entrenched known-answer discourses in the classroom.Practical implicationsDrawing on this study’s findings about questioning practices of participants in their role as reader (as opposed to discussion leader or classroom teacher), the authors suggest that teachers and teacher educators consider the following: First, teachers need to understand the power of interpretive authority and known-answer discourses and compare them explicitly to their own everyday practices through rehearsals and reflection. Second, teachers might focus less on theme and more on exploration of individual lines, patterns and unusual authorial moves. Finally, when preparing to teach, if teachers can reconnect with the stance and language of uncertainty and curiosity, they are likely to ask more authentic questions.Social implicationsThese findings suggest both the power of entrenched known-answer discourses to constrain and the potential power of making visible and drawing on teachers’ literary reading practices in out-of-school contexts.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors’ knowledge, no studies have made an empirical comparison of the relationship between the role a teacher takes on during discussion and the kinds of questions they ask about literature. This study offers insight into the value of everyday curiosity and other out-of-school resources that teachers could – but often do not – bring to their facilitations of classroom discussions. The findings suggest that teachers, teacher educators and researchers must recognize and recruit teachers’ everyday practices to the LA classroom.

Researchers in literacy studies have been refining the definitions and examples of literacy development over the past four decades that have significantly improved our knowledge about marginalized cultures and their literacy development. This article explores the literacy practices of the medieval Scandinavians through archaeological and textual sources. First, I explore the gaps in literacy research followed by a detailed examination of medieval Nordic literacy practices shown in the runestones, artifacts, and the sagas. The intent of this article is to shed light on a literacy tradition outside of the privileged Latinate Christian tradition during the medieval period.

The subject of this book is the relationship Henry James alludes to when he celebrates the novel's "large, free character of immense and exquisite correspondence with life." Featuring the interplay of fictions and "the real world," its twelve essays explore and expand ideas of what fiction and reality might be. They ask such questions as: How does fiction communicate truth about the world? What is the connection between perceived historical reality and the linguistic form of narration? How does writing formulate or mediate the tensions between public and private life? What exactly do people at a given time want and get from a particular novel? How does a novelist's life give form to a novel? How are reality, the novel knowledge, and the practice and form of fiction known as realism related and what might realism mean as today's critics reconstruct it? In the wake of Ian Watt's pioneering work, we tend to think of such questions as questions about the novel, and with the exception of the two framing pieces, these essays concern that genre. Tzvetan Todorov opens the volume by examining wildly imaginative accounts written about early global exploration. The next three essays focus on works by Charles Dickens - Michael H. Levenson on David Copperfield, Robert M. Polhemus on The Old Curiosity Shop, and Roger B. Henkle on Dombey and Son. They emphasize the role of cultural psychology in the writing and reception of this most popular of nineteenth-century novelists and stress the novel's historical function in mediating between "inner" and "outer" life. Next come three studies of realism: by John Bender on the political and epistemological implications of power and violence inherent in realist prose fiction - specifically, in Godwin's Caleb Williams, by George Dekker on the dialectical interplay of conceptions of fiction and realism by Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson; and by William M. Chace on Joyce's realism in Ulysses. Joseph Frank and Thomas C. Moser follow with studies of Dostoevsky and Faulkner that relate key biographical experiences to Crime and Punishment and The Sound and the Fury. Next, Juliet McMaster uses Jane Austen's The Watsons to illustrate how criticism can reconstruct an unfinished work, and John Henry Raleigh shows how the reality of a fictional text (Frederic Manning's Her Privates We) can come to have striking evidential power and effect. The final piece by Edward V. Said, returning us to ideas of travel and representation of life on the margin, shows the continual intertwining and merging of theory and fiction.

The subject of this book is relationship Henry James alludes to when he celebrates novel's large, free character of immense and exquisite correspondence with Featuring interplay of fictions and the real world, its twelve essays explore and expand ideas of what fiction and reality might be. They ask such questions as: How does fiction communicate truth about world? What is connection between perceived historical reality and linguistic form of narration? How does writing formulate or mediate tensions between public and private life? What exactly do people at a given time want and get from a particular novel? How does a novelist's life give form to a novel? How are reality, novel knowledge, and practice and form of fiction known as realism related and what might realism mean as today's critics reconstruct it? In wake of Ian Watt's pioneering work, we tend to think of such questions as questions about novel, and with exception of two framing pieces, these essays concern that genre. Tzvetan Todorov opens volume by examining wildly imaginative accounts written about early global exploration. The next three essays focus on works by Charles Dickens - Michael H. Levenson on David Copperfield, Robert M. Polhemus on The Old Curiosity Shop, and Roger B. Henkle on Dombey and Son. They emphasize role of cultural psychology in writing and reception of this most popular of nineteenth-century novelists and stress novel's historical function in mediating between inner and outer life. Next come three studies of realism: by John Bender on political and epistemological implications of power and violence inherent in realist prose fiction - specifically, in Godwin's Caleb Williams, by George Dekker on dialectical interplay of conceptions of fiction and realism by Henry James and Robert Louis Stevenson; and by William M. Chace on Joyce's realism in Ulysses. Joseph Frank and Thomas C. Moser follow with studies of Dostoevsky and Faulkner that relate key biographical experiences to Crime and Punishment and The Sound and Fury. Next, Juliet McMaster uses Jane Austen's The Watsons to illustrate how criticism can reconstruct an unfinished work, and John Henry Raleigh shows how reality of a fictional text (Frederic Manning's Her Privates We) can come to have striking evidential power and effect. The final piece by Edward V. Said, returning us to ideas of travel and representation of life on margin, shows continual intertwining and merging of theory and fiction.

Smith and Smitherson’s Theatre of the Absurd

Rere Kē/moving Differently Indigenizing Methodologies for Comparative Indigenous Literary Studies Chadwick Allen Most of the outstanding Maori artists of today are people who were educated in the Western tradition. Many of them went to Western-type art schools in New Zealand, which taught them much about Western art but little about their traditional art forms. So here were Maori artists more at home with European art forms and techniques than with their own culture. They were educated to become uncomfortable and guilty about their lack of knowledge about themselves. One can see in their innovative work evidence of a struggle to come to terms with their Maori identity. Sidney Moko Mead, "Dimensions of Meaning in Maori Art" (1981) Let us begin with the premise that, like other contemporary indigenous arts, indigenous literatures written in English—or primarily in English—are products of complicated genealogies, genealogies that include diverse and multiply intersecting lines: political, social, personal, textual, linguistic, aesthetic. The influences that bear upon any particular indigenous text written, say, after World War II are not only manifold but also highly imbricated. Mead's description of some of the forces that drive the innovative works of contemporary Maori artists is certainly apt as a description of the forces that drive the work of many indigenous writers; but, of course, it cannot capture the actual diversity of twentieth-and twenty-first-century indigenous experience and artistic or literary practice. No single description can. Therefore, in addition to our premise of the genealogical [End Page 1] complexity of contemporary indigenous texts, let us concede at the outset that the project of contemporary indigenous literary studies is both difficult and complicated (in the most positive sense of these words) and that the work of literary studies will not produce simple formulas for understanding indigenous literatures. What kinds of methodologies, then, might enable us to better understand and to better appreciate how contemporary indigenous literary texts produce not only culturally inflected, historically situated meanings for their several audiences but also various kinds of aesthetic interest and pleasure? And what kinds of methodologies might help us to focus specifically on what is indigenous in contemporary indigenous texts? Much attention has been devoted to critical methodologies that focus on single works or on groups of works by a single indigenous author; attention also has been devoted to methodologies that arrange works or authors into categories according to some criterion, such as genre, historical period of production, regional or tribal affiliations, gender or sexual orientation, major themes, and so on. Some of these methodologies emphasize the idea of authorial intent through biographical studies or through interviews with living authors or their associates. Other methodologies emphasize various types of literary contextualization that focus on relevant aspects of indigenous and nonindigenous cultures (including literary cultures), history, politics, social movements, or activism. Less attention has been devoted to methodologies that emphasize the possible influences of indigenous languages or indigenous arts traditions other than oral traditions on the production and reception of contemporary texts written in English. And only slight attention has been devoted, thus far, to the specific issue of the physical production and distribution of contemporary indigenous literatures (how texts come to be published or not published and circulated either narrowly or widely) or to the specific issue of their reception (how particular audiences produce meaning through their encounters with specific texts or how these audiences assign to specific texts literary, cultural, or personal value). Not surprisingly, perhaps, relatively little attention has been devoted to methodologies that emphasize the comparison of [End Page 2] specific texts across contemporary indigenous literature traditions, especially across what have become standard indigenous groupings (e.g., New Zealand Maori, North American Indians, or Indigenous Australians). This essay began as a contribution to the symposium Comparative Approaches to Indigenous Literary Studies held at Auckland University in Aotearoa/New Zealand in August 2006. In the spirit of that international symposium, which brought together scholars and writers...