| Sumario: | "Though classicists have always believed in endings," Elizabeth Cook-Lynn writes in Aurelia, "the real Dakotah storytellers like Aurelia do not." Throughout her 1999 novella collection, Aurelia: A Crow Creek Trilogy, Cook-Lynn enacts a project of literary nationalism. Cook-Lynn also juxtaposes the Dakota topics and literary practices of her narrative against occasional but pointed references to Greek and Roman antiquity and to classicism: the scholarly mode that has enshrined Greek and Roman antiquity in both etiologies and ideals of "Western civilization" for centuries. A superficial reading might suggest that Cook-Lynn's classical invocations implicitly prioritize Western classicism or distract from Aurelia's Dakota literary nationalism. While such invocations do create multiple effects, their primary thrust is to redirect the reader to a Dakota-centered orientation of philosophical-artistic priorities. Ultimately, this examination of Cook-Lynn's classical invocations illuminates in action a provocative and deftly challenging authorial stance that Cook-Lynn identifies with literary greatness in her own criticism.
|
|---|