Coyote (and Other Tricksters)

Native American literature is known not only for creation myths but also for trickster figures such as Coyote, Raven, and Rabbit. The picture of the coyote above is from Wikimedia Commons.

To begin with, here is the site where I found the Mayan tale "Coyote and The Hen" and the story of "Coyote's Adventures in Idaho" as well as stories about the other tricksters.  I really like that this site notes where a number of tales come from. 

http://www.ilhawaii.net/~stony/loreindx.html

To find out which stories come from our area, here is a map.  Click on each state to find out which tribes, for example, lived in Maryland.

http://www.native-languages.org/states.htm

On the other hand, this page lists the names of the tribes. 

http://www.native-languages.org/languages.htm#alpha

Here a professor from Pittsburg State University in Kansas discusses the trickster in Native American culture.  This site also contains links to various tribes' stories about Coyote. 

http://members.cox.net/academia/coyote.html

The author of this site from the College of the Siskiyous in California discusses Native American traditional prose narratives in general:

http://www.siskiyous.edu/Shasta/fol/nat/index.htm

(The picture above is from Trinity University's online journal on trickster studies.)

For more detailed information, see Wyman P. Meinzer's contribution to a 1995 symposium on the coyote in the American Southwest:

http://texnat.tamu.edu/symposia/coyote/p30.htm

Here are a few more stories about Coyote:

http://www.americanfolklore.net/folktales/wa.html

http://www.shoshoneindian.com/legend_001.htm

http://www.siskiyous.edu/Shasta/fol/nat/flood.htm

http://www.siskiyous.edu/Shasta/fol/nat/coyote.htm

  

Other trickster figures are Raven and Rabbit.  As you will see below, different tribes in different regions had their tricksters.  The picture of Raven is from the Canadian Museum of Civilization Corporation's website:

For more information about Gordon Miller's watercolor, see this link below: 

http://www.civilization.ca/cmc/exhibitions/aborig/nwca/nwcam11e.shtml

In the Southeastern U.S., Rabbit was the trickster.   The picture below is from Professor Tina L. Hanlon's web page on Appalachian Animal Tales/Native American Tales from Appalachia at Ferrum College in Virginia.

Here is a link to Professor Hanlon's article: 

http://www.ferrum.edu/applit/bibs/tales/rabbitotter.htm

Then once you move to Africa and the Caribbean, the trickster is Anansi the Spider.  In South Carolina, this figure is called Aunt Nancy.  I wish that I could find a picture of her!

Tricksters appear in other cultures' stories as well.  Reynard the Fox, a figure from French folktales, is depicted below.  (The picture comes from Wikimedia Commons, but it originally appeared in a children's book from the 1860s.)

On Joseph Campbell (Crossposting from EN 201)

This afternoon, after our class today, I realized that this entry from my EN 201 blog could be useful as we consider Marlow and his quest in Heart of Darkness. I like to show a tape of Moyers' interview with him in EN 201 because it sets up a useful, modern definition of the hero and the quest that may well explain our discomfort with Gilgamesh and Achilles as heroes. Additionally, Campbell studied so many cultures that he provides a good model for our approach to world literature this semester. (It's true, though, that scholars have criticized Campbell for being too much of a generalist, but at our level, a generalist is probably more helpful to us than a specialist would be.)

First of all, here is a biography of Joseph Campbell from the Joseph Campbell Foundation:

http://www.jcf.org/about_jc.php

This essay was written by a student of Campbell and includes some recollections about him:
http://www.folkstory.com/campbell/campbell.html

Here is an outline of Campbell's "stages of the hero's journey." It's the same handout that I gave you today (Monday 1/28).  Compare these stages to the sequence of events in Heart of Darkness and other works that we read this semester.

http://ias.berkeley.edu/orias/hero/JourneyStages.pdf

FYAmuse, Campbell's work also influenced George Lucas' initial Star Wars movies. Campbell, in turn, had been influenced by Carl Jung's theories of psychology and Mircea Eliade's history and philosophy of religions. For more information about Jung, see the site below:

http://webspace.ship.edu/cgboer/jung.html

For more information about Eliade, see the site below:

http://www.westminster.edu/staff/brennie/eliade/mebio.htm

If you are interested in writing or storytelling, this site from Maricopa Community College in Arizona could be worth exploring.

http://www.mcli.dist.maricopa.edu/smc/journey/

Below are some critiques of Campbell's work and his approach. The first is from a Christian perspective. The second responds to concerns that Christian theologians have with Campbell and the study of mythology.
http://logosresourcepages.org/FalseTeachings/campbell.htm
http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=171

Here is a defense of Campbell's work and approach, also from The Christian Century. This defense mentions Campbell's use of Jungian psychology as well as the extent to which Campbell is misread and to which he misread Jung.

http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=766

From what's out there, Joseph Campbell and his work or his influence might be a good topic for an annotated bibliography--or a presentation!

Questions on Heart of Darkness

 

Hello again,

I thought I'd post three new quotes of the day from Joseph Campbell, author of Hero with a Thousand Faces and scholar of world mythology:

"A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself. "

"I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive."

"What each must seek in his life never was on land or sea. It is something out of his own unique potentiality for experience, something that never has been and never could have been experienced by anyone else. "

How do these quotes from Campbell apply to Marlow and Kurtz?  How do these quotes apply to Conrad's character of the young Russian -- or to the character played by Dennis Hopper in Apocalypse Now?  Could Willard (Martin Sheen's character) be a hero?

And are we missing the point when we *don't* focus on Heart of Darkness as a quest with a hero--when we focus on Vietnam or the 19th century or colonialsm?  Alternately, are we missing the point when we don't talk about colonialism?  After all, Conrad's novella is set not only in the heart of darkness but also in the heart of the Belgian empire, and all of his characters (Marlow included) are shaped by their role in this empire.

Keep blogging & keep reading Heart of Darkness.  I think you'll find that part 1 is the hardest since it is so descriptive.

By the way, the picture above is from Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, a film inspired by Heart of Darkness.  The actor pictured above is Dennis Hopper.  Hopper plays a photojournalist based on the questing young Russian in Conrad's novel.  By the way, Hopper was also in the trail-blazing 1960s movie Easy Rider.  Now we know him as the fellow in the financial services ads.

Here's a link to a trailer for Apocalpyse Now Redux:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0qnfbekbSa0

Dr. Szlyk

Siddhartha

First of all, I want to welcome the new members to this blog. Thanks for signing up early. I've been writing these blog entries to get myself ready for the fall semester, but even so it's good to have an audience. Moreover, since EN 201 can be an intense course, getting a head start is a wise idea, no matter how you do it.

In this entry, I want to talk a little bit about Siddhartha, one of our extra readings (along with the Penelopiad). Don't worry; the image above is not the edition I expect you to buy. I just liked the cover, and I couldn't find an image of the edition I have.

Like Margaret Atwood's Penelopiad, Herman Hesse's Siddhartha is a modern response to an ancient story. Set in India at the time of Buddhism's beginnings, Siddhartha tells the story of a man's search for self-actualization through Hindu mysticism, Buddhism, physical love (with Kamala), parenting, companionship, and nature. Siddhartha is contrasted with his boyhood friend, Govinda who becomes a Buddhist monk. A work written by a 20th-century European, Siddhartha also fits into our concept of world literature as a way of reading. Hesse's book complements Atwood's nicely, and this pairing is necessary because after all EN 201 is a course in world literature, not just western literature. As we will see this semester, Hinduism & Buddhism have influenced authors and readers just as classical mythology and literature *and* Christianity have. It will be interesting to read Siddhartha alongside the excerpts from the Ramayana and the Maharabhata (or even Peter Brook's video) as well as the Tale of Genji. There Murasaki often expresses a wish to become a Buddhist nun, particularly once she is in her thirties.

Yet both Hesse and Atwood are writing outside India and Ancient Greece, respectively. To what extent can either author write about these cultures? Consider, too, that Atwood is a feminist and that as a novelist, she is writing in a tradition that, for so many ways, has opposed itself to the epic. Hesse himself had been to India, but it appears from the introduction in my edition that his visit there had been very frustrating. (Keep in mind that he was writing in the early twentieth century, a time before the days of easy jet travel or even any jet travel. One might travel to the other side of the world as Hesse did or as anthropologist Margaret Mead did, but it was a long & involved process. Often a trip to another part of the world was a once-in-a-lifetime event.)

Additionally, as a questing hero, Siddhartha complements Odysseus, Job, and Gilgamesh, to name three whom we will encounter. It's true that Hesse's book is *not* an epic, even a literary version of an epic, but like Odysseus or Gilgamesh, Siddhartha is involved in a quest, and, like Job, his story is a very spiritual one. (But, as we often say with Job's story or Dante's Divine Comedy, can we say that Hesse intended Siddhartha's story to be of cosmic importance? I suspect that he felt that this story was very relevant to himself and his times--Europe after WWI, though.)

This, of course, brings up the question why each author, Hesse in particular, decided to "go outside of his culture's 'tradition.'" And this question, in turn, leads to a term called "orientalism." Scholar and critic Edward Said popularized this term in the 1970s, and, strictly speaking, it refers to 19th & 20th century British, French, and American representations of the Middle East (or what was once called "the Orient") as an exotic Other in opposition to the "normative" West. However, even though EN 201 focuses on earlier works, many written at a time when the West was *not* politically or culturally dominant, we still need to be concerned about how we read this earlier literature. After all, for example, literature occupied a different role in each culture and was defined differently. The Tale of Genji was written in Japanese, a language that, for the elite of Murasaki Shikibu's time, was a woman's language. Men read and wrote Chinese. Homer's epics began as tales told aloud to an audience. And, to return to English literature, at a time not too far from when EN 201 ends & EN 202 begins, literature included history but not novels. Novels were regarded as throwaway reading. Although the playhouse was a place where all levels of (London) society met, the manuscripts of the plays performed there were not allowed into the Bodleian Library. So it's important to recognize that as twenty-first century readers, we are reading examples of world literature differently from the way that their authors expected them to be read--or heard.

With that, I'll close. Take care.