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This thesis aims to analyze how Native American tradition storytelling functions in the life narratives of Leslie Marmon Silko and Linda Hogan¡XStoryteller and The Woman Who Watches over the World¡Xto portray the formation of the self which is inseparable from the themes of the stories that the authors constantly center on. I categorize their stories into three spheres¡Xthe land, the community and the myth¡Xand in so doing illustrate three dimensions of the self: the land-based self, the collective self and the mythical self. Through writing about the land, the community and the myth, indirect ways of self-telling can be observed and is worth further discussion. This thesis argues that it is through this indirect writing technique that Silko and Hogan are allowed to disclose their private selves without violating the Native American tradition and to turn the self-telling into a means of speaking for the community. In the end, this thesis will compare the selves that Silko and Hogan present in each dimension and point out that Silko¡¦s self is community-based while Hogan¡¦s self centers on the entire humanity.

This is a study of Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony analyzing the process of renewal and the use of stories as guides. Silko's work deals with problems faced by all who experience the death and destruction of war, a problem complicated by a Native American heritage. Tayo's struggle to complete his ceremony and find renewal is intertwined with his interaction with the medicine man Betonie and the mysterious woman Ts'eh. By the end of the novel, Silko shows that only through a respect for the world can mankind achieve completeness and harmony.

Esta dissertação trata de duas obras autobiográficas escritas por autoras nativas que ganharam reconhecimento na década de 70: Bobbi Lee Indian Rebel (1975), da nativo-canadense Lee Maracle, e The Turquoise Ledge: a Memoir (2010), da nativo-americana Leslie Marmon Silko. A importância destas autoras para a Renascença Nativo-Americana/Canadense é inegável, e cada uma delas contribuiu fazendo uso de estratégias diferentes: enquanto Maracle começou sua carreira com Bobbi Lee Indian Rebel, de cunho autobiográfico, Silko esperou mais de trinta anos para publicar The Turquoise Ledge. A problematização de se ver estas obras pelo olhar estritamente ocidental, ou estritamente nativo, é discutida, assim como o aparentemente inevitável tom político dessas narrativas. Ainda que mais de três décadas separem a publicação das obras selecionadas, perguntas como: Estas obras podem ser consideradas literatura?, Elas têm como principal propósito engrandecer feitos pessoais das autoras?, ou Como essas narrativas contribuem para o empoderamento do povo Nativo? podem nunca chegar a serem respondidas, mas, de fato, incitaram a escrita desta dissertação e nortearam nossa análise / This dissertation brings to the fore two autobiographical works by Native women authors who first gained recognition in the 1970s: Bobbi Lee Indian Rebel (1975), by Native-Canadian Lee Maracle and The Turquoise Ledge: a Memoir (2010), by Native-American Leslie Marmon Silko. These womens undeniable importance to the Native American/Canadian Renaissance is clear, and each of these authors decided to contribute to Native literature using different strategies: while Maracle started her career with Bobbi Lee Indian Rebel, an autobiographical work, Silko waited over thirty years to publish her The Turquoise Ledge. The problematization of seeing either works strictly through Western or strictly through Native perspectives is also addressed here, along with the apparently inevitable political tone present in both narratives. Despite the fact that the two selected works have been written over three decades apart, questions such as: Can these works be considered literature?, Do they have as main purpose to highlight the authors personal accomplishments? or How do they work to empower the Native people? may never be answered, but they did incite the writing of this dissertation and guided our analysis

Esta dissertação trata de duas obras autobiográficas escritas por autoras nativas que ganharam reconhecimento na década de 70: Bobbi Lee Indian Rebel (1975), da nativo-canadense Lee Maracle, e The Turquoise Ledge: a Memoir (2010), da nativo-americana Leslie Marmon Silko. A importância destas autoras para a Renascença Nativo-Americana/Canadense é inegável, e cada uma delas contribuiu fazendo uso de estratégias diferentes: enquanto Maracle começou sua carreira com Bobbi Lee Indian Rebel, de cunho autobiográfico, Silko esperou mais de trinta anos para publicar The Turquoise Ledge. A problematização de se ver estas obras pelo olhar estritamente ocidental, ou estritamente nativo, é discutida, assim como o aparentemente inevitável tom político dessas narrativas. Ainda que mais de três décadas separem a publicação das obras selecionadas, perguntas como: Estas obras podem ser consideradas literatura?, Elas têm como principal propósito engrandecer feitos pessoais das autoras?, ou Como essas narrativas contribuem para o empoderamento do povo Nativo? podem nunca chegar a serem respondidas, mas, de fato, incitaram a escrita desta dissertação e nortearam nossa análise / This dissertation brings to the fore two autobiographical works by Native women authors who first gained recognition in the 1970s: Bobbi Lee Indian Rebel (1975), by Native-Canadian Lee Maracle and The Turquoise Ledge: a Memoir (2010), by Native-American Leslie Marmon Silko. These womens undeniable importance to the Native American/Canadian Renaissance is clear, and each of these authors decided to contribute to Native literature using different strategies: while Maracle started her career with Bobbi Lee Indian Rebel, an autobiographical work, Silko waited over thirty years to publish her The Turquoise Ledge. The problematization of seeing either works strictly through Western or strictly through Native perspectives is also addressed here, along with the apparently inevitable political tone present in both narratives. Despite the fact that the two selected works have been written over three decades apart, questions such as: Can these works be considered literature?, Do they have as main purpose to highlight the authors personal accomplishments? or How do they work to empower the Native people? may never be answered, but they did incite the writing of this dissertation and guided our analysis

Ecocritical theology relates to American fiction as it connects nature and spirituality. In my development of the term “neo-pastoral” I begin with Virgil’s Eclogues to serve as examples for spiritual and nature related themes. Virgil’s characters in “The Dispossessed” represent people’s alienation from the land. Meliboeus must leave his homeland because the Roman government has reassigned it to their war veterans. As he leaves Meliboeus wonders why fate has rendered this judgment on him and yet has granted his friend Tityrus a reprieve. Typically, pastoral literature represents people’s longing to leave the city and return to the spiritual respite of the country. When Meliboeus begins his journey he does not travel toward a specific geographical location. Because the gods have forced him from his land and severed his spiritual connection to nature he travels into the unknown. This is the starting point from which I develop neo-pastoral threads in contemporary literature and discuss the alienation that people experience when they are no longer connected to a spirit of the land or genius loci. Neo-pastoralism relates Bakhtin’s idea of chronotope and the expansion of the narrative voice of the novel to include the time/space dialogic. Neo-pastoral fiction shows people in their quest to find spirituality in spite of damage from chemical catastrophic events and suggests they may turn to technology as an ideological base to replace religion. The (anti) heroes of this genre often feel no connection with Judeo-Christian canon yet they do not consider other models of spirituality. Through catastrophes related to the atomic bomb, nuclear waste accidents, and the realization of how chemical pollutants affect the atmosphere, neo-pastoral literature explores the idea of apocalypticism in the event of mass annihilation and the need for canonical reformation. The novels explored in this dissertation are John Updike’s Rabbit, Run; Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49; Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer; Don DeLillo’s White Noise; Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead; Toni Morrison’s Paradise; and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

In order to establish a working understanding of borders, the critical conversation must be conscious of how the border is being used politically, theoretically, and socially. This thesis focuses on the border as forcibly ensuring the performance of identity as individuals, within the context of borderlands, become embodiments of the border, and their performance of identity is created by the influence of external borders that become internalized. The internalized border can be read both as infection, a problematic divide needing to be removed, as well as an opportunity for bridging, crossing that divide. I bring together Charles Bowden (Blue Desert), Monique Mojica (Princess Pocahontas and the Blue Spots), Leslie Marmon Silko (Ceremony, Almanac of the Dead), and Guillermo Verdecchia (Fronteras Americanas) in order to develop a comprehensive analysis of the border and border identity development. In these texts, individuals are forced to negotiate their sense of self according to pre-existing cultural and social expectations on either side of the border, performing identity according to how they want to be socially perceived. The result can often be read as a fragmentation of identity, a discrepancy between how the individual feels and how they are read. I examine how identity performance occurs within the context of the border, brought on by violence and exemplified through the division between the spirit world and the material world, the manipulation of costuming and uniforms, and the body. / Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship Master’s Award).

Cette thèse a pour objectif de faire une lecture génétique de ce que consiste l’hostile hospitalité en Amérique et de ses prismes au cœur des littératures autochtones. J’y analyserai que l’histoire de l’hospitalité, dont la racine signifie à la fois hospes pour hôte et hostis pour ennemi, est une dialectique complexe lors du topos de la rencontre et témoigne d’une économie de l’échange qui au fil de ses transformations aura une incidence sur les tensions au sein de la littérature autochtone. J’étudierai comment dans cet échange fondé sur l’hospitalité le pôle étymologique de l’hostilité illustre que sous couvert d’hospitalité des lois sourdes d’équivalence, de compensation travaillèrent l’exclusion en des stratégies qui passeront par l’herméneutique, la mise en mythologie de ses cultures et d’insidieuses lois logocentriques religieuses. Différentes œuvres telles Ulysse et la Bible hébraïque poseront les fondements de ces traces au cœur des textes de la colonisation mexicaine et de la littérature autochtone nord-américaine afin d’illustrer l’empreinte patriarcale et hostile qui habite et transcende toujours les littératures actuelles. Les chapitres un à trois sont à entrevoir comme des fondements de cette trace transhistorique. Le premier chapitre esquissera une ligne de l’exclusion fondamentale entre le logos et le muthos depuis la Grèce archaïque, les circonvolutions du mythe de Thanksgiving et ses déviations historiques reverront les constructions hégémoniques de cette histoire de la survivance en Amérique. Le chapitre deux questionnera particulièrement l’économie de la transcendance au cœur de l’hospitalité, présence souvent habitée de diktats religieux et procédant d’une économie insidieuse d’exclusion. J’y montrerai à partir des scènes fondamentales de l’hospitalité dans l’Odyssée et la Bible hébraïque que ces histoires mettent en forme une hospitalité de plus en plus limitée devant prendre les traits du même et de l’équivalence au contraire de la tradition du potlatch dont l’économie est disruptive. Le chapitre trois se tournera essentiellement sur le corps des femmes dans les rites de l’hospitalité : de la Bible hébraïque à la figure de la Malinche, autochtone aztèque ayant été la traductrice de Cortes, les femmes furent des objets discriminés dans les rituels de l’hospitalité, des outils d’échanges et d’expropriation. Le dernier chapitre, éclairé des trois chapitres précédents, fera un bond dans le présent. À partir de textes de Leslie Marmon Silko, de Thomas King et des archives de la psychose du windigo, j’aborderai particulièrement la question de la langue et de l’exclusion épistémologique. Cette longue trace de l’hostilité au cœur de l’hospitalité dévoilera les sourdes lois régulant l’échange et montrera donc que si le texte et la lettre instituent cette première violence, ils ont aussi la possibilité de par leur dialectique, de proposer un dire de l’hospitalité et de renverser et se réapproprier une parole, le texte étant donc travaillé en miroir des mêmes paradoxes que le phénomène de l’hospitalité. / The objective of this thesis is to undertake a genetic reading of what hostile hospitality in America consists of and its prisms at the heart of indigenous literature. I will analyze that the history of hospitality, whose root means both hospes as host and hostis as enemy, is a complex dialectic at work in the topos of the encounter and testifies to an economy of exchange that, as it changes, will affect the tensions at the heart of indigenous literature. I will study how in this exchange based on hospitality, the etymological basis of hostility illustrates that under its guise, muted laws of equivalence and compensation elaborated exclusion into strategies that will run through hermeneutics, the mythology of its cultures and insidious religious logocentric laws. Various works such as The Odyssey and the Hebrew Bible laid the foundations for these traces in the texts of Mexican colonization and North American indigenous literature, patriarchal and hostile traces trace that still inhabits and transcends current literature. Chapters one to three are to be seen as the foundations of this transhistorical trace. The first chapter will outline a line of fundamental exclusion between the logos and the muthos from archaic Greece, the convolutions of the myth of Thanksgiving, and its historical deviations will consider the hegemonic constructions of this history of survival in America. Chapter two will focus on the economy of transcendence at the heart of hospitality, a presence often inhabited by religious diktats and stemming from an insidious economy of exclusion. I will show from the fundamental scenes of hospitality in The Odyssey and the Hebrew Bible that these stories shape an increasingly limited hospitality that must take on the same and equivalent features and differs from the potlatch tradition whose economy is disruptive. Chapter three will focus mainly on the bodies of women in the rites of hospitality: from the Hebrew Bible to the figure of La Malinche, an Aztec native who was the translator of Cortes, women were discriminated against in the rituals of hospitality, tools of exchange and expropriation. The last chapter, illuminated by the three previous chapters, will jump into the present. Based on texts by Leslie Marmon Silko, Thomas King, and the archives of the windigo psychosis, I will focus on the question of language and epistemological exclusion. These extensive traces of hostility at the heart of hospitality will show the muted laws regulating the exchange and will therefore show that even if the text and the letter institute this first violence, they also have the possibility, through their dialectics, to propose a way of saving hospitality by subverting the hostile part of its dialectic, the text being therefore elaborated as a reflection of the same paradoxes as the phenomenon of hospitality.