論文名稱：非典型原住民活力：傑偌•維森諾《熱線療者》中的 後印地安、喜劇與移動力 指導教授：梁一萍 教授 研究生：尤吟文 論文提要內容： 傑偌•維森諾（Gerald Vizenor）認為所謂的「印地安」（indian）是一個沒有指涉目標的空集合（absence without reference），而「原住民」（native）才是指這個文化所代表的真正的意涵。相較於其他原住民作家的作品，維森諾的寫作方式可說是獨樹一幟。在原住民文學中，許多的主題不外乎是尋找身分認同（identity）的過程、強調人與自然之間的和諧關係、表現白人社會與原住民文化之間的隔閡等等。這種思鄉式（nostalgia）的描寫方式對於維森諾來說不只是種老掉牙的（stereotypical）表現方式，更是主流文學（literature of dominance）加諸在原住民文化上的表現方式（manifest manners）。為了與主流文學抗衡，維森諾以搗蛋鬼論述（trickster discourse）的寫作技巧來顛覆原住民文學的傳統，以天馬行空的想像力及奇異怪誕的內容來表現另類的原住民作品。 《熱線療者》是維森諾在1997年的作品，書中的主人翁－－差不多部朗（Almost Browne）是本書中的搗蛋鬼，他穿越時空的限制，帶給讀者一個又一個的故事，這些故事不具有教導意義，而是表現出想像力的無限。差不多部朗曾經在許多維森諾的小說故事中呈現，在《熱線療者》一書中，他與他的姪子，也就是小說的敘述者，以插訶打諢、嘻笑怒罵的方式與政治界和學術界有了第一線接觸，他們也回到過去，目睹了原住民傳說的起源。每個小故事，不管時間地點為何，差不多部朗和他的姪子總是在場。這些故事也搭著原住民第一列火車－－納那波佐快車（Naanabozho Express），隨著列車的移動傳出去。 本文的第一章為總論，簡述維森諾生平、《熱線療者》的故事情節與維森諾自成一格的批評理論。為了表現出原住民文化以及生活的生命力、多樣性和複雜性，維森諾提出所謂的「後印地安」的觀念，指出「印地安」是一種虛擬的再現（simulated representation），只有具有想像力和生命力的「後印地安」才是真正的存在（presence），這也是第二章所討論的部分。第三章則是從喜劇出發，檢討原住民文學的悲劇犧牲性（tragic victimry）實為主流文學的表現方式，只有透過全喜劇論述（comic holotrope）才能真正了解原住民文學。第四章則聚焦於移動力（motion），直指原住民文學的不可限制性，唯有透過對於移動力的了解，原住民文學才能表現出其生命力及想像力，就像差不多部朗或是納那波佐列車一樣，永遠在宇宙間移動（always in motion）。第五章為結論，《熱線療者》是維森諾寫的最後一本有關差不多部朗的小說，在這本小說中，維森諾以另類的筆調及呈現方式將原住民文學帶到一個充滿創造力的世界，經由他的喜劇效果，《熱線療者》提供了另一個檢視原住民文學的角度（alternative, alter-native）。 / Indian, as Gerald Vizenor points out, is the absence of natives without reference to real native cultures while native is the presence of the native survivance. In the field of Native American Literature, the most common themes are the quest for identity, the harmony between nature and people and the conflict between native and white cultures. The nostalgic representation of natives depicted in these common themes, for Vizenor, is not only a stereotypical clich□ but also the manifest manners imposed on Native American Literature by the literature of dominance. In order to resist the burden imposed on Native American Literature, Vizenor, with his unique writing style, applies trickster discourse to subvert the stereotypes brought forth by the literature of dominance. With creativity and imagination, Vizenor presents alternative aspects for Native American Literature. Fascinated by the extraordinary writing style and narrative strategy, I find that the novel, Hotline Healers, illustrates Vizenor’s comprehensive viewpoints on Native American literature. Hotline Healers is Vizenor’s most recent novel which was published in 1997. In the novel, Almost Browne is a protagonist trickster who travels beyond the spatial and temporal limitations. The stories he tells with his travels are not intended to provide lessons; on the contrary, they are the true representation of native imagination. Almost Browne and his cousin, the narrator in the novel, take the first Native train, the Naanabozho Express, to give lectures in several occasions and result in several funny and hilarious encounters with politicians as well as academia. They also return to the past and witness the origins of the native folklores. Almost Browne and his cousin are omnipresent in the stories. With the moving of the Naanabozho Express, more and more stories disseminate native imagination and creativity. There are five chapters in my thesis. The first chapter, “Introduction,” summarizes the life and works of Gerald Vizenor, gives a plot summary of Hotline Healers, and introduces Vizenor’s critical conceptions on Native American Literature. In Chapter Two, I illustrate Vizenor’s view on postindian. Postindian, as Vizenor indicates, absolves the burden of stereotypical indian representations. With the idea of postindian, Vizenor focuses on the presence of natives as well as native vitality and imagination and thus subverts the culturalist stereotypical portraita of indian which is the simulated representation without reference. In Chapter Three, I concentrate on the comic effect employed by Vizenor in Hotline Healers. Comic holotrope is one of Vizenor’s writing techniques which is different from the themes of tragic victimry found in most Native American literary works. Comic holotrope presents the vitality of native culture while tragic victimry burdens Native American Literature with “manifest manners.” In Chapter Four, I explore the concept of motion in the novel. The idea of motion is not only the demonstration of the bounderlessness of Native American literary imaginatinos but also the representation of the transformative native wisdom. In the fifth chapter, I conclude that the novel, being Vizenor’s latest novel on Almost Browne, incorporates his alternative vision of tribal survivance and critical concepts of postindian, comic holotrope, and motion to elevate Native American Literature to a creative and imaginative world. The novel provides readers with an alternative point of view toward Native American Literature.

This thesis reads the fiction and poetry of Spokane/Coeur d’Alene writer Sherman Alexie as predominantly urban Indian literature. The primary experience of the growing majority of American Indians in the twenty-first century consists in the various threats and opportunities presented by urban living, yet contemporary criticism of literature by (and about) American Indians continues to focus on the representations of life for those tribally enrolled American Indians living on reservations, under the jurisdiction of tribal governments. This thesis provides critical responses to Alexie’s contemporary literary representations of those Indians living apart from tribal lands and the communities and traditions contained therein. I argue that Alexie’s multifaceted representations of Indians in the city establish intelligible urban voices that speak across tribal boundaries to those urban Indians variously engaged in creating diverse Indian communities, initiating new urban traditions, and adapting to the anonymities and visibilities that characterise city living. The thesis takes a broadly linear chronological structure, beginning with Alexie’s first published collection of short stories and concluding with his most recent works. Each chapter isolates for examination a distinct aspect of Alexie’s urban Indian literature, so demonstrating a potential new critical methodology for reading urban Indian literatures. I open with a short piece explaining my position as a white, British scholar of the heavily politicised field of American Indian literary studies, before the introductory chapter positions Alexie in the wider body of Indian literatures and establishes the historical grounds for the aims and claims of my research. Chapter one is primarily concerned with the short story ‘Distances’, from The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993), and the Ghost Dance religion of the late nineteenth century, reading Alexie’s representations of this phenomenon as explorations of the historical and political tensions that divide those Indians living on tribal lands and those living in cities. Chapter two discusses the difficulties of maintaining a tribal identity when negotiating this divide towards the city, analysing the politics of indigenous artistic expression and reception in Alexie’s first novel, Reservation Blues (1995). Alexie’s second novel, Indian Killer (1996), signals the relocation of his literary aesthetics to the city streets, and chapter three detects and unravels the anti-essentialist impulse in Alexie’s (mis)use of the distinctly urban mystery thriller genre. Grief, death and ritual are explored in chapter four, which focusses on selected stories from Ten Little Indians (2003), and explains Alexie’s characters’ need for new, urban traditions with reference to an ethics of grieving. Chapter five connects the politics of time travel to the representation of trauma in Flight (2007), and addresses Alexie’s representations of violence in Ten Little Indians and The Toughest Indian in the World (2000), proposing that it is the structural violences of daily life, rather than the murder and beatings found throughout his work, that leave lasting impressions on urban Indian subjectivities. My conclusion brings together my approaches to Alexie’s urban Indian literature, and suggests further areas for research.

This dissertation explores the entanglements of racialized histories and experiences in America with conceptions of animals and animality and examines how African American and Native American writers render these intersections in early-twentieth-century American literature. While animals, with their physical and behavioral features and subordinate status within Western cultural frameworks, were fundamental figures in the US racial imaginary, which relied on dehumanization as a weapon of control, animals (and conceptions about them) also curiously offered a way around and outside of the categorically demeaning declarations of “the human.” Through literary explorations of the nonhuman, the writers in this project reveal forms of interspecies affinity and understanding that affirm biotic connection and also make fantastically strange creatures with whom humans share domestic and proximal space. The figure of “the human” as separate, above, and radically distinct from other life becomes not only strange as well through these readings, but becomes visible as a prominent obstacle to social egalitarian and ecologically cooperative ways of living. I build on research in animal studies and critical race studies approaches to posthumanism to observe how race inflects literary animal representations while also tracking how animality interacts with various notions of personhood. While animalization often coincides with racialized and dehumanized personhood status, writers like Anita Scott Coleman and Zitkala-Ša rupture those associations and engage the animal (comparisons to it and becomings with it) as a fundamentally humanizing figure. On the flip side, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God demonstrates how a racialized animalization trope operates in the novel to defend the killing of a black man. These writers all collapse the binary between human and animal while demonstrating how that binary operates in concert with racial binaries in an American context that extols the human. Reading animals through a lens that acknowledges how race and animality intersect ultimately opens routes for rethinking what it means to be human and defining how we view the nonhuman.

In her novel Tracks, Louise Erdrich tells the story of a band of Anishinaabe early in the twentieth century. Through the two narrators, one a tribal elder and the other a mixedblood who eventually abandons the traditions of the tribe, the novel offers two divergent perspectives of the events that take place as the government divests the tribe of its land. The conflicting perceptions of these occurrences, which are magical realist in nature, underscore the conflict within the tribe to maintain tradition in the face of the ever-increasing influence of European settlers. The purpose of this thesis is to explore the perceptions at odds with one another in order to shed new light on the significance of Erdrich’s use of magical realism in the text. Highlighting Erdrich’s engagement with magical realism, a largely postcolonial literary device, will hopefully expand notions of identity and authenticity within the Native American literary tradition.

This study suggests, through a rhetorical analysis of the role of orators and oration in Ralph Ellison's <em>Invisible Man</em> and N. Scott Momaday's <em>House Made of Dawn</em>, that literature can be a valuable resource for the study of comparative and contrastive rhetoric; conversely, it also demonstrates that a knowledge of culturally-specific rhetorical and narrative practices is important for understanding ethnic-American novels and their social significance. Written during periods of intense racial upheaval in the United States, <em>Invisible Man</em> and <em>House Made of Dawn</em> are, to use a term coined by George Kennedy, metarhetorics: works that explore, from cross-cultural and intercultural perspectives, the ends and means of rhetoric and the ways in which rhetoric is linked to the formation of individual, ethnic, and national identities. This exploration is undertaken through the diegetic rhetoric of the novels, the depiction of rhetorical practice within their fictional worlds. Ellison's young orator, who vacillates between accommodationist, communist, and African American vernacular rhetorics, and Momaday's alienated protagonist, who is healed through the postcolonial rhetoric of a Peyotist street preacher and the ritual rhetoric of a displaced Navajo chanter, both illustrate how the recovery of traditional rhetorical practices is an integral part of cultural empowerment. The interaction of culturally-specific systems of rhetoric is also embodied in the extradiegetic rhetoric of the novels, the means by which the novels themselves influence their readers. Central to the novels' own rhetorical effectiveness is their authors' strategic appropriation of modernist techniques, which allowed the works to negotiate multiple literary traditions or social contexts, to penetrate and transform the American canon, and to accommodate and affect readers from a broad range of cultural backgrounds.

This study suggests, through a rhetorical analysis of the role of orators and oration in Ralph Ellison's <em>Invisible Man</em> and N. Scott Momaday's <em>House Made of Dawn</em>, that literature can be a valuable resource for the study of comparative and contrastive rhetoric; conversely, it also demonstrates that a knowledge of culturally-specific rhetorical and narrative practices is important for understanding ethnic-American novels and their social significance. Written during periods of intense racial upheaval in the United States, <em>Invisible Man</em> and <em>House Made of Dawn</em> are, to use a term coined by George Kennedy, metarhetorics: works that explore, from cross-cultural and intercultural perspectives, the ends and means of rhetoric and the ways in which rhetoric is linked to the formation of individual, ethnic, and national identities. This exploration is undertaken through the diegetic rhetoric of the novels, the depiction of rhetorical practice within their fictional worlds. Ellison's young orator, who vacillates between accommodationist, communist, and African American vernacular rhetorics, and Momaday's alienated protagonist, who is healed through the postcolonial rhetoric of a Peyotist street preacher and the ritual rhetoric of a displaced Navajo chanter, both illustrate how the recovery of traditional rhetorical practices is an integral part of cultural empowerment. The interaction of culturally-specific systems of rhetoric is also embodied in the extradiegetic rhetoric of the novels, the means by which the novels themselves influence their readers. Central to the novels' own rhetorical effectiveness is their authors' strategic appropriation of modernist techniques, which allowed the works to negotiate multiple literary traditions or social contexts, to penetrate and transform the American canon, and to accommodate and affect readers from a broad range of cultural backgrounds.

This research is the result of a long-standing interest in the work of one individual, George Sword who composed two hundred and forty-five pages of text in the Lakota language using the English alphabet in the period 1896 through 1910. In the past scholars have studied Lakota narratives and songs and with each study new insights are gained. However, the focus generally in oral literary research has been in the study of content and not process in Lakota oral traditions. In order to better understand the characteristics of Lakota oral style this study shows how it is composed and structured in the work of George Sword. The research focus is from a qualitative perspective concerned with exploring, describing, and explaining a culturally specific Lakota oral narrative more commonly found in history and ethnographic disciplines, where it is a special type of case study research. The primary method used is an analysis of historic documents and original text in Lakota to address the issues raised in the general research problem: How do you define Lakota literature? In the end this study shows the way in which Lakota oral narrative is composed, how its practice produced a distinct form. During the course of this study, what became apparent in George Sword's Lakota narratives were the formulaic patterns inherent in the Lakota language used to tell the narratives as well as the recurring themes and story patterns. The primary conclusion is that these patterns originate from a Lakota oral tradition. This analysis can be used to determine whether any given written narrative in Lakota oral tradition is oral or not; and leads the way for further research

Against a Divided Land is a tale of escape from the poverty of the Yuma Indian reservation, the flight of a young girl and her family into modern American in the 1970's. The stories in the collection emerge via the narrator: a forty-year-old woman exploring landscape and memory. Her recollections as a mother and international traveler, juxtaposed alongside her childhood on the reservation, reveal the unique concerns of Native Americans in the era of government relocation and displacement. The stories in this collection paint a picture of United States subculture rarely seen. The accounts link the narrator to the past in surprising ways as they push forth with a modern voice, imagining a brighter future: a future filled with both loss and beauty. From Africa to the Southwest, the characters in these essays seek relationships across typical boundaries.

In an attempt to narrow a perceived gap between two literary fields, this thesis provides a comparative analysis of Luis Alberto Urrea’s The Humminbird’s Daughter, and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead. I explore and critique the ways in which Luis Alberto Urrea mobilizes mestizaje and Chicana/o nationalist rhetoric. I argue that mestizaje stems from colonial representations that inscribe indigenous people into a narrative of erasure. Furthermore, I address Leslie Marmon Silko’s critique of mestizaje within Almanac of the Dead. / text

The purpose of this project was to prepare a group interpretation script which is derived from the books cited in the title. An effort was made to prepare a unified script reflecting contemporary American Indian concepts of mysticism, philosophy, ecology, psychology, and education by selecting appropriate portions from the three books. The thesis includes a production concept, production procedures, the rationale for selection of excerpts, and the finished script, It is designed to employ seven readers and is divided into six parts. Those elements may be altered to fit various physical arrangements and program lengths.