The Completeness of Washington Irving’s A Tour on the Prairies

Kime, Wayne R.

doi:10.1353/wal.1973.0035

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…After the achievements of Terrell, the critical study of A Tour began in earnest. Dula (1973) assessed the initial reception of the text, Kime (1973) analyzed the text as a "complete" narrative, i.e., "a formal or thematic whole" and concluded that Irving discovered "the West as reality". The studies of Clark (1978) and Reynolds (2004) tried to augment the assessment of the West given by Kime, with each of them averring that the West played an important part in shaping the narrative.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Object-Oriented Aspect of Irving’s a Tour on the Prairies

Mikado

2019

LANGLIT

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This brief paper has basically two aims. First, it intends to introduce object-oriented ontology (OOO), a branch of contemporary thought which regards everything as an individual “object” of equal standing, as a potentially effective theoretical framework to examine a literary text, especially in order to explore the complexity of interactions between/among both human and nonhuman objects on a horizontal plane. Second, it analyzes how the narrator of A Tour on the Prairies, one of the long-neglected texts of Washington Irving, gradually begins to question the naive human/object binary and broadens his horizons through an encounter with another object. Specifically, I examined a series of the contacts which the narrator makes with buffaloes, and then demonstrated how he, though taking a naïve, human-centered schema in the beginning, gradually attains the liberal perspective through the recognition that the object before him is a being that is ontologically equal with him. I concluded the argument by attesting that the text, albeit in a gentle manner, invited us to see the world and existences in it with a more liberal—i.e. object-oriented—perspective.

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