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Authors

Stories of the Beginning of the World

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Questions for Discussion and Writing

Why are they here?  In this five-volume collection of “American Literature” we begin with three texts that have no specific author, that come down to us over an expanse of centuries, and also in translation. We face difficult questions about how we should read them now – “we” being, in all likelihood, modern Americans in classrooms and libraries, people who can know these traditions only in the most cursory way.  What sort of beginning can we make here – and what relationships can we plausibly consider, between these very old stories and modern literary and cultural experience?  With those general issues in mind, think or write about the following questions:

1. What happens to a landscape, a place, when a story is associated with it?  What places do you know that seem to take on a heightened importance or vitality because of a myth, a legend, or a sacred text that connects directly to that town, region, or geographical feature?  When we come to a place that is new for us, what are the various effects of knowing that other people, from another time or culture, have thought about it, dreamed about it, and talked about it intensely? 

2.  In some traditions, stories of creation have an aura of grandeur about them – there are cataclysms, momentous decisions, unimaginable efforts.  In other traditions, everything seems to begin from some fairly ordinary, or even capricious, process of making.  What relationships are possible between a sense of how things came to be, and how the world might be looked at now?  The Western world puts great emphasis on the centrality of the individual self.  What stature do human beings seem to hold in the creation stories in NAAL? 

3. On the web, find images of landscapes associated with the Iroquois people – for example, the woodlands and lakes of Upstate New York and southern Ontario – and locate some good pictures of the lands of the Pima – the hills and arid lands of southern Arizona.  What connections do you sense between the look and dimensions of these places and the creation stories they generated?  How does the modern American landscape influence modern dreams and stories of new beginnings?