Study Questions and Discussion Ideas for Week Two:

The following discussion topics and questions shaped our first class of the second week, for which we read Iroquois and Pima creation stories, two letters by Columbus, and part of Cabeza de Vaca’s Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America.

Iroquois and Pima creation stories:

• Why does the Norton Anthology begin with Iroquois and Pima creation stories? Especially one not recorded until 1827?

• We discussed main features of the Iroquois story, in which a woman descends

“from a great distance” and lands upon a turtle:

“While holding her, the turtle increased every moment and became a

considerable island of earth, and apparently covered with small bushes” (19).

The story features also two twins, one good and one evil, who vie for governance of the universe.

• How does such a story promote a worldview in conflict with, or at least markedly different from, a Judeo-Christian worldview?

• We discussed the syncretic nature of this story and the idea that no legend, no text, no document, exists in a vacuum. What factors influence the change over time of a creation story?

• Does the placement of the Native creation legends at the beginning of an anthology of American Literature serve to provide a “longer” history for American literature? What are the political difficulties in this?

Columbus

• In discussing Columbus’s letters immediately after the Native creation stories, the

following questions emerged as obvious: What sort of conversation does the

juxtaposition of these narratives create for the reader?

• How do we judge textual accuracy and what is the significance of accuracy?

Columbus was seeking to preserve a vision of “what he saw” in the New World. Do the Native creation legends function in this way?

• Consider the value of Columbus’s authorial “I/eye.” His accounts are valuable (to fifteenth- and sixteenth-century readers? To the king and Queen of Spain? To present-day readers?) because they were printed? Or for another reason?

• We considered Benedict Anderson’s notion of print capitalism (from Imagined Communities) and Benjamin’s discussions of the ramifications of material reproduction. What is the relationship between the history of printing and mass reproduction of text and Columbus’s narratives and the value assigned them (by the editors of the Norton, by you, by historians, etc.)?

• Comment on the possible relationship between mass reproduction of text and the colonization of the New World. Is it significant that these occurred contemporaneously? (Most attribute the creation of what we conceive of as “printing” to Gutenberg, who in 1452 “invented” movable type.)

Cabeza de Vaca

• How does de Vaca depict the lands of the New World through which he traveled, as well as the inhabitants (some but not all), as “prelapsarian”?

• Does it appear that de Vaca employed narrative tropes to tell his story? Does it function as a kind of odyssey? How so?

• Consider the following opposition, and perhaps the way it flips by the end of de Vaca’s account: “civilized versus ‘savage.’”

• What does de Vaca become by the end of his journey? Is this journey a knowledge-journey? A spiritual journey? A journey of conquest? What does de Vaca conquer, perhaps?

• In the epilogue to Cyclone Covey’s version of Cabeza de Vaca’s Adventures in the Unknown Interior of America, written by William T. Pilkington, Pilkington asserts that de Vaca’s stories “revived rumors of the Seven Cities of Cíbola and eventually prompted the Coronado expedition . . . The adventures of Cabeza de Vaca and his companions, then, were the first link in a chain of events that resulted in the Spanish Colonization of the Southwest” (145). Consider this proposition.

• Pilkington also calls de Vaca’s journey an “American journey inward” (150). How was his a journey inward and how was it an “American journey” (and I don’t just mean this geographically)?