Balancing the world: Spatial design in contemporary Native American novels

This study examines spatial concepts that inform the distinctive textual and narrative strategies of contemporary writers with Native American heritages. Works by Paula Gunn Allen, Louise Erdrich, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, and James Welch focus discussions. A Bakhtinian discourse analysis, Joseph Frank's "principle of reflexive reference," and relevant ethnographic studies of traditional performances guide the reading of these works. These approaches reveal a rich fusion of Western and indigenous poetic principles.; Stylistic choice, character design, physical description, and narrative development prove critical to discovery of spatial categories in this literature. In Chapter I, the text is examined as a stylistically determined "space." The multiple narrating voices that comprise the texts of Momaday's works yield evidence of the author's "multi-languaged consciousness," his valorization of indigenous discourse modes, and his expansion of poetic boundaries across cultures. The social space implicit in a novel's multiple narrator perspectives, a narrator design employed by all the writers examined, is the subject of Chapter II. These communities of narrating voices argue for the common rhetorical privileging of an indigenous ideal social contract based on a presumption of reciprocity and interrelatedness. In Chapter III, Gaston Bachelard's "poetics of space" enhances analysis of Momaday's and Silko's transformations of traditional Native cosmic designs into literary setting, symbol, and evidence of protagonist's development. Chapter IV investigates Allen's and Welch's development of extraordinary secondary characters, tied to traditional Native cosmic designs, who become vehicles for psychological and social commentary. Chapter in outlines the range of descriptive, symbolic, and textual strategies these writers use to center, orient, and "balance" protagonists within textual, social, geographic and cosmic spaces.; The basic finding of this study is that spatial categories are of fundamental importance to the narrative strategies in the works examined. Two qualities emerge as critical to these authors' uniting of spatial forms and narrative purposes--the dynamic nature of spatial categories and their intrinsic interrelatedness.