Thomas Claviez Knihy

An impressive collection bringing together contributions of renowned scholars on the topic of a New Poetics of Community that goes beyond both a romantic nostalgia for homogeneity and the myths of social engineering and rational choice.

PETER BOLZ The Lakota Sun Dance Between 1883 and 1997: The Outlawing and Revival of a Cultural Symbol KARIN BERNING The Messenger Feast: Myth and Cultural Identity HANS-ULRICH SANNER Confessions of the Last Hopi Fieldworker MARIN TRENK "White Indians" and "Red Euro-Americans": Crossing Cultural Boundaries in Colonial North America CHRISTIAN F. FEEST Mission Impossible? Native Americans and Christianity DOMINIQUE LEGROS First Nation Postmodern Cultures: (Re-)Constructing the (De-)Constructed and Celebrating the Changes JULIE CRUIKSHANK The Social Life of Texts: Keeping Traditions "Oral" in a Time of Textual Studies THOMAS CLAVIEZ Narrating Environmental Ethics: N. Scott Momaday and Walter Benjamin MARIA MOSS The Achilles' Heel of Absolute Power: Narrative Survival Strategies in Native American Literature ARNOLD KRUPAT Nationalism, Indigenism, Cosmopolitanism: Three Critical Positions on Native American Literatures DAVID MURRAY Cultural Sovereignty and the Hauntology of American Identity MICK GIDLEY Reflecting Cultural Identity in Modern American Indian Photography Index

In a first, theoretical part, this study analyzes what role „otherness“ plays in the most influential moral-philosophical approaches to date - from Aristotle and the Neo-Aristotelians (Alasdair MacIntyre, Martha Nussbaum) via Kantianism and its deconstructors (Jean-François Lyotard, J. Hillis Miller) to the works of Paul Ricoeur and Emmanuel Levinas - and sheds light on its highly problematic status in Western notions of justice and aesthetics. Starting from a revised notion of the sublime, the second part uses the different theoretical approaches to interpret four American novels (Harriet Beecher Stowe's 'Uncle Tom's Cabin', Herman Melville's 'Billy Budd, Sailor', Richard Wright's 'Native Son', and N. Scott Momaday's 'House Made of Dawn'), and examines how far the respective moral-philosophical systems carry in elucidating these texts, as well as what role literary-historical and generic strategies play in dramatizing the encounter with „otherness“.

The debate over aesthetics dates back to the New Criticism and its aftermath. Following the discrediting of its theoretical principles, two factions emerged. Some critics defended aesthetic complexity—embracing ambiguity, irony, and negativity—while rejecting ideology critique's attack on aesthetic autonomy. In contrast, revisionist critics marginalized aesthetic categories, viewing textual features as complicit with the social status quo, and focused on art previously overlooked due to its political or social agendas. Currently, the dialogue between these factions often devolves into mutual accusations of ideological bias. The essays in this collection aim to bridge this divide by reintroducing the notion of aesthetics that has been largely absent from critical discourse in American literature. They emphasize that literary imagination creates a specific social field of meaning and necessitates a particular reader's engagement with language as a tool for shaping reality. Through close readings, the authors examine the cultural and political roles of literature, highlighting both the political implications of literary forms and the varying historical functions that texts serve at the time of their publication and beyond.