讲座题目：逃离美国梦

讲座人：Conrad Shumaker 教授

主持人：李伟 副教授

讲座时间：14:30--16:30

讲座日期：2018年6月7日（星期四）

地点：新校区立心楼425

主办单位：社科处、外国语学院

Title: Escaping the American Dream

Lecturer: Prof. Conrad Shumaker

Host: Associate Prof. Li Wei

Time: 14:30--16:30

Date: 2018-06-07

Venue: Room 425, Lixin Building, Gaoxin Campus

Hosted by: Dept.of Social Science and College of Foreign Languages

主讲人简介:

Conrad Shumaker教授于1982年在加州大学洛杉矶分校获得博士学位，专业为美国文学。曾任教于亚利桑拉大学和加州大学洛杉矶分校，目前为中阿肯色大学教授、英文系系主任，美国大学教授协会会员、美国印第安文学研究协会会员、西部文学协会会员。2008年在纽约Perter Lang出版社出版专著Southwestern American Indian Literature in the Classroom and Beyond。发表学术论文数十篇，创作诗歌10余首，并出版有个人诗集1本。

讲座摘要：

Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony: Escaping the American Dream

For the Laguna Pueblo writer, Leslie Marmon Silko, the American Dream represents a view of the world that is utterly opposed to her people’s Pueblo traditions and destroys both the land and the people who have lived there from long before the Europeans arrived. In Pueblo tradition, the world is a web, an interrelationship between peoples—human and nonhuman—that is threatened by the American view that the world is a collection of dead things, of resources to be used in the pursuit of wealth.  Her main character, Tayo, is torn between these views of the world. Having returned from serving in World War II, he finds that his friends are spending their time regretting the loss of acceptance as “Americans” that their uniforms gave them. They are turning away from the Pueblo world and embracing “witchery,” the view that the world (and people) can be cut into pieces to be manipulated for the sake of gaining power. Tayo must find a way to reconnect to his American Indian heritage and to the land in the face of an American Dream that both seduces and rejects his people and makes it hard to maintain his traditions.