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COPYRIGHT 1998 University of Wisconsin Press
James Ruppert, American Indian Literature and Critical Studies ser. 15. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995. xiii + 174 pp. $29.95; $11.95 paper.
Almost thirty years after N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn began a new era in American Indian fiction, we are still grappling with fundamental issues in the work of Momaday and those select others--notably Leslie Marmon Silko, James Welch, Louise Erdrich, and Gerald Vizenor--who have become mainstays of college courses in recent Native American literature. The issues stem primarily from these writers' attempts to function simultaneously in two narrative traditions, one Western and one indigenously North American, arising out of radically different epistemologies and cultural contexts long poised against each other in outright historical conflict. This apparent paradox has frustrated even that majority of critics who resist the reductive temptation to see these texts either as contributions to a Western-based tradition of American fiction or as vehicles of continuity with traditional oral cultures. The problem has always been to articulate a basis on which the two claims can be reconciled: how can novels in English, sharing in many ways an idiom, narrative strategies, fields of reference, and writer-to-audience relationships characteristic of contemporary American fiction, serve as vehicles of continuity for tribal oral traditions carried on for centuries in different languages embedded with different cultural assumptions and using narrative strategies dictated in part by their performative contexts? And how can the often discontinuous and fragmented narrative techniques of modern fiction, born out of wariness about the possibility of grand and unifying cultural narrative, affirm tribal values that emphatically embrace balance, harmony, and the authority of the past? Lacking answers to questions like these, we grope for the formal and substantive criteria that can both link "American Indian fiction" to and distinguish it from each of its constituent discourses.
James Ruppert's Mediation in Contemporary Native American Fiction and Kimberly M. Blaeser's Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition (by far the most complete study to date of the most challengingly experimental and perhaps most influential of today's leading American Indian writers) lead us toward these answers and, in so doing, help us appreciate the centrality of Native American literature to many of the various discussions that compose contemporary critical discourse. Though their purposes differ--Blaeser devotes herself entirely to illuminating Vizenor's work, while Ruppert proposes a broad interpretive framework for reading recent American Indian fiction and applies it to six novels, including one by Vizenor--both writers bring original insight and, most of all, impressively systematic detail to a critical territory charted in broad outlines over the past few years by writers such as Arnold Krupat, Louis Owens, and Vizenor himself.(1) Ruppert, for instance, distinguishes contemporary American Indian literature precisely by its self-conscious dialogic engagement with widely divergent cultural and aesthetic premises. For writers such as Momaday and Silko, techniques of...
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