Unsettling the Literary West: Authenticity and Authorship

Nathaniel Lewis. Unsettling the Literary West: Authenticity and Authorship. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2003. 297 pp.

In one swift stroke, Nathaniel Lewis attempts to turn Western American literature and its critical traditions on their heads. With Western American literary scholars struggling to overcome the perceived second-hand status of their literature in the traditional literary canon, Lewis offers a reason for such status and a way to make these texts more palatable to the East Coast literary establishment. The answer lies in the postmodern theories of Jean Baudrillard. While the application of Baudrillard's ideas on the literature of the American West offer insight into the production and critical reception of such texts, those same theories do little to illuminate Native American texts and critical traditions.

With postmodern theory in hand, Lewis identifies that" [t]he pursuit, production, and marketing of the 'real West,' all but define the history of western literature and criticism" (1). As a result of Western authors' fidelity to the "real West" or what they perceive to be "real," the West as a place and idea becomes a simulacrum for both writers and readers. Western literature loses its literary force because "[i]magination, style, fancy, and genius were avoided, and any polished regularity...