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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.

Thesis (M.A.)--Montana State University--Bozeman, 2004. / Typescript. Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Walter Fleming. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 109-113).

Thesis (Ph.D)--University of Wollongong, 2004. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references: p. 327-345.

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.

This dissertation proposes to examine the conspiracy narratives of Don DeLillo, Joan Didion, and Leslie Marmon Silko that retell American experience with the Cold War and its culture of paranoia for the last half of the twentieth century. Witnessing the resurgence of Cold War paranoia and its dramatic twilight during the period from late 70s to mid-80s and the sudden advent of the post-Cold War era that has provoked a volatile mixture of euphoria and melancholia, the work of DeLillo, Didion, and Silko explores the changing mode of Cold War paranoid epistemology and contemplates its conditions of narrative possibility in the post-Cold War era. From his earlier novels such as Players, The Names, and Mao II to his latest novel about 9/11 Falling Man, DeLillo has interrogated how the American paradigm of paranoid national self-fashioning envisioned by Cold War liberals stands up to its equally paranoid post-Cold War nemesis, terrorism. In his epic dramatization of Cold War history in Underworld, DeLillo mythologizes the doomed sense of paranoid connectivity and collective belonging experienced during the Cold War era. In doing so, DeLillo attempts to contain the uncertainty and instability of the post-Cold War or what Francis Fukuyama calls "post-historical" landscape of global cognitive mapping within the nostalgically secured memory of the American crowd who had lived the paranoid history of the Cold War. In her novels that investigate the history of American involvements in the Third World from Eisenhower through Kennedy to Reagan, Didion employs the minimalist narrative style to curb, extenuate, or condense the paranoid narratives of Cold War imperial romance most recently exemplified in the Iran-Contra conspiracy. In her latest Cold War romance novel The Last Thing He Wanted, Didion reassesses her earlier narrative tactic of "calculated ellipsis" employed in A Book of Common Prayer and Democracy and seeks to commemorate individual romances behind the spectacles of Cold War myth of frontier. Departing from the rhetoric of "hybrid patriotism" in Ceremony, a Native American story of spiritual healing and lyricism that works to appease white paranoia and guilt associated with the atomic bomb, Silko in Almanac of the Dead seeks to subvert the paranoid regime of Cold War imperialism inflicted upon Native Americans and Third World subjects by mobilizing alternative conspiracy narratives from the storytelling tradition of Native American spirituality. Silko?s postnational spiritual conspiracy gestures toward a global cognitive mapping beyond the American Cold War paradigm of "paranoid oneworldedness".

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).