Dissertations / Theses: 'Native American Literature'

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Moore, David L. "Native knowing : the politics of epistemology in American and Native American literature /." Thesis, Connect to this title online; UW restricted, 1994. http://hdl.handle.net/1773/9376.

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Hay, Jody L. "Native American women in children's literature." Thesis, The University of Arizona, 2002. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/291972.

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This thesis focuses on the roles of Native women in children's literature. The study explores the works of five Native women writers in the United States that have successfully published adult literature and at least one children's book since 1990. The purpose of the research is to gain a better understanding of what these writers reveal about the roles of Native women in their literature for children. The data was collected using content analysis on the books and a questionnaire to determine (1) what roles the Native writers convey in their children's literature; and (2) what these women are writing in this field and their perspectives on the writing process. The findings of this research discuss these writers' portrayals of the complexity of Native women's roles as well as offer insight into their craft.

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Davis, Randall Craig. "Firewater Myths : alcohol and portrayals of Native Americans in American literature /." The Ohio State University, 1991. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1487687959968421.

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Holm, Sharon Lee. "Writing native sovereignty : the political aesthetic in contemporary Native American literature." Thesis, Birkbeck (University of London), 2007. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.444197.

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Dakin, Alana E. "Indigenous Continuance Through Homeland: An Analysis of Palestinian and Native American Literature." Ohio University Honors Tutorial College / OhioLINK, 2012. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ouhonors1340304236.

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Donovan, Kathleen McNerney. "Coming to voice: Native American literature and feminist theory." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1994. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/186769.

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This dissertation argues that numerous parallels exist between Native American literature, especially that by women, and contemporary feminist literary and cultural theories, as both seek to undermine the hierarchy of voice: who can speak? what can be said? when? how? under what conditions? After the ideas find voice, what action is permitted to women? All of these factors influence what African American cultural theorist bell hooks terms the revolutionary gesture of "coming to voice." These essays explore the ways Native American women have voiced their lives through the oral tradition and through writing. For Native American women of mixed blood, the crucial search for identity and voice must frequently be conducted in the language of the colonizer, English, and in concert with a concern for community and landscape. Among the topics addressed in the study are (1) the negotiation of identity of those who must act in more than one culture; (2) ethnocentrism in ethnographic reports of tribal women's lives; (3) misogyny in a "canonical" Native American text; (4) the ethics of intercultural literary collaboration; (5) commonality in inter-cultural texts; and (6) transformation through rejection of Western privileging of opposition, polarity, and hierarchy.

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Gorelova, Olena. "Postmodernism, Native American literature and issues of sovereignty." Thesis, Montana State University, 2009. http://etd.lib.montana.edu/etd/2009/gorelova/GorelovaO0509.pdf.

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Criticism of Native American literature is barely two centuries old, while criticism of Western literature boasts a history that is quite a bit longer. The questions on how to read and interpret tribal narrative and modern American Indian fiction are still urgent topics that trigger numerous debates among literary scholars. What theories to employ and what approaches to use to dispel misinterpretations of the literature are still matters open to suggestion. Postmodernism, the new world trend, has influenced all spheres of life, not excluding literature. Although it does seem to better account for American Indian voices as it shifts attention to local narratives and re-evaluation of history, the issue of whether it is applicable and favorable to Native American literature and its cause is a debatable one. Postmodern theory claims to liberate the suppressed voices including those of Native Americans, but at the same time presents the danger of limiting Native American literature to another set of frames while denying it its purpose, i.e. achievement of the establishment of Native American national literature. Many American Indian scholars insist that American Indian literature should not be interpreted using mainstream approaches, such as postmodernism, since they have already done enough damage, but implementing American Indian philosophies instead, such as nationalism. It also seems premature to apply postmodern theory since it deconstructs history and identity, which are still to be constructed in Native American literature. Tribal literature and tribal realities are closely connected and, therefore, the fight for Native American literature and how to interpret it appears to be a part of a bigger fight, the one for sovereignty, both national and intellectual. The "post" of postmodernism, as well as the "post" of post-colonialism, might simply not be present for Native American literature yet and, therefore, theories offered by nationalism can at the given moment be more promising to American Indian literature and its purposes.

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Suzuki-Martinez, Sharon S. 1963. "Tribal Selves: Subversive Identity in Asian American and Native American Literature." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1996. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/565575.

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Stigter, Shelley, and University of Lethbridge Faculty of Arts and Science. "Double-voice and double-consciousness in Native American literature." Thesis, Lethbridge, Alta. : University of Lethbridge, Faculty of Arts and Sciencec, 2005, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/10133/288.

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This thesis follows the interaction of "double-voicing" and "double-consciousness" in Native American literary history. It begins with surviving records from the time of colonial contact and ends with works by Leslie Marmon Silko and Thomas King, two contemporary authors of the Native American Literary Renaissance. "Double-voicing" is a common feature found in many works preserved by early anthropologists from various Native American oral traditions. However, after colonial contact this feature largely disappears from literary works written by Native American authors, when it is replaced by the societal condition "double-consciousness." With the revitalization of cultural knowledge in the mid-twentieth-century, Native authors also revitalize their rhetorical techniques in their writing and the "double-voice" feature reemerges coupled with a bicultural awareness that is carried over from "double-consciousness."
vi, 98 leaves ; 29 cm.

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Whitehouse, Paul Charles. "Violence and frontier in twentieth century Native American literature." Thesis, University of Warwick, 2016. http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/85416/.

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The central argument of my work is that authors Leslie Marmon Silko, Louis Owens, and Gerald Vizenor, working in the latter half of the twentieth century, use violence as a literary device (literary violence) for exposing and critiquing modes of systemic violence inherent in the formative originary myths of dominant US culture, specifically the mythic frontier and West. I argue that they engage with questions arising out of the systemic and normative violence required to sustain exceptionalist and supremacist Euramerican myth, which in turn sanitise the unspeakable violence of settler colonialism. This sanitising effect produces a form of transcendent violence, so called because the violence it describes is deemed to be justified in accordance with dominant ideology. In addressing this, Silko rewrites the mythic legacies of frontier and the West, rearticulating the unspeakable violence of conquest and domination, resulting in an anti-Western, pre-apocalyptic vision that turns away from European modernity and late twentieth century capitalism, looking instead to an Indigenous worldview. Owens similarly proposes an alternative reading of frontier where binaries of racial and cultural difference become malleable and diffuse, producing unexpected breaks with established ideology and narratives of dominance. The unseen systemic violence of the provincial town, in many ways the American societal idyll in microcosm, emerges during key confrontations between Native and non-Native characters in the liminal spaces and boundaries of the provincial town. Bringing these different threads together, Vizenor critiques systemic and institutionalised violence in his fiction and non-fiction work. His breakthrough novel Darkness in Saint Louis Bearheart shares key characteristics with the work of Silko and Owens in this regard. Transgressing borders of taste, binaries of simulated Indianness, and notions of Euramerican cultural dominance, Vizenor’s mocking laugh destabilises the notion of completed conquest and closed frontiers as the final word on Euramerican supremacy.

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Ronnow, Gretchen Lyn. "John Milton Oskison: Native American modernist." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1993. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/186243.

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The works of John Milton Oskison, Cherokee writer, originally published in popular magazines, have been out of print since the 1920s. Oskison's stories have often been dismissed as sentimental and lacking a Native American focus; a more diligent reading, however, shows subtle and complex Native American motifs and concerns. John Oskison was born in Indian Territory in 1874, attended Willie Halsell College, Stanford and Harvard Universities, and then began to write for major New York magazines. It was not necessarily popular nor politically advantageous at that time to be known as Indian, especially if one wished to influence public opinion as a journalist. Oskison's Native American point of view and sympathy are strongly coded in the text, embedded in narrative displacements and rhetorical silences. His are "writerly" texts; at the most superficial level readers may see only populist and assimilationist "messages," but the narrative complexities belie such easy readings. Oskison grappled with the issues of being a highly educated mixed-blood trying to defend a tribal heritage while speaking in the most public arenas. This dissertation is a critical examination of the way this struggle manifests itself in his literary production.

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Craddock, Tina. "Intergenerational trauma in African and Native American literatures." Thesis, East Carolina University, 2014. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=1558803.

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The enslavement and persecution of African and Native peoples has been occurring in the U.S. since the 1600s. There have been justifications, explanations and excuses offered as to why one race feels superior over another. Slavery, according to the Abolition Project, refers to "a condition in which individuals are owned by others, who control where they live and at what they work" (e2bn.org, 2009). Dr. Maria Yellow Horse Braveheart researched the concept of historical trauma as it relates to American Indians, whereby she found that trauma due to unresolved grief, disenfranchised grief, and unresolved internalized oppression could continue to manifest itself through many generations. This thesis will examine the intergenerational effects of historical trauma as they are depicted in selected African and Native bildungsromans. These specific works were chosen because they allow me to compare and contrast how subsequent generations of these two cultures were still being directly affected by colonialism, especially as it pertains to the loss of their identities. It also allows me to reflect on how each of the main characters, all on the cusp of adulthood, make choices for their respective futures based on events that occurred long before they were born.

Chapters One and Two highlight specific works from African American authors Toni Morrison and Alice Walker. Walker's novel, The Color Purple, depicts the life of an African American girl in the rural South of the 1930s. In this work I will examine how the loss of the male traditional role of provider and protector has affected the family dynamics and led to the male assuming the role of oppressor. In Morrison's Song of Solomon, I will examine the importance of identity and how one man's flight from slavery has affected the family structure of four subsequent generations. Both of the protagonists, Celie and Milkman, were born free, and yet still feel enslaved, just as their ancestors were, by their lack of choices as well as their quest for purpose and personal justice.

Chapters Three and Four will discuss literary works by Native American authors Louise Erdrich and Sherman Alexie, both vocal advocates of educating the lost generations—those who were forbidden to learn of and practice their language or tribal rituals due to colonialism—as well as Anglo-Americans on the importance of preserving the culture and heritage of their people. In Erdrich's The Round House, young Joe Coutts' family is tragically ripped apart by a physically violent attack on his mother. In an attempt to discover the truth of what really happened and who harmed her, Joe embarks on a journey in which borders, both literal and figurative, jurisdiction, and justice will be defined. The choices made by Joe, the adolescent, will have a direct impact on the evolution of Joe, the adult. In Alexie's Flight, Zits is a fifteen year old boy who seemingly belongs nowhere and to no one. It is this lack of identity that initially leads him down a path of destruction and on a magical journey of self-discovery where he will learn that he has within himself the ability to overcome his own personal tragedies, define who he is, and find happiness. The final chapter introduces the concept of restorative justice, a legal term that emphasizes repairing the harm done to crime victims through a process of negotiation, mediation, victim empowerment and reparations. I will also briefly discuss how both African and Native people are reclaiming their cultural identities through naming, ceremony, and traditions. I will briefly define a new concept developed by Dr. Joy Deruy Leary, referred to as post traumatic slave syndrome, and will show that like historical response trauma, its symptoms can be traced back generations to the enslavement of African people. I will argue that justice, identity and the lack of choices are major themes identified in each of these works which tie them all together. I will also argue that these themes have a direct correlation to the signs and symptoms of both Historical Response Trauma and Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome as defined by Dr. Braveheart and Dr. Leary, and how ultimately each of these protagonists used some means of restorative justice to stop the cycle of trauma and begin the process of healing

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Udel, Lisa J. "REVISING STRATEGIES THE LITERATURE AND POLITICS OF NATIVE WOMEN'S ACTIVISM." University of Cincinnati / OhioLINK, 2001. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin990625725.

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Salles, Juliana Almeida. "Empowering natives through autobiographical writing: Lee Maracles Bobbi Lee indian rebel and Leslie Marmon Silkos The turquoise ledge: a memoir." Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, 2014. http://www.bdtd.uerj.br/tde_busca/arquivo.php?codArquivo=7043.

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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

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McDougall, Morgan Elizabeth. "Teaching Native American and Middle East American Literature in the Secondary School Classroom." Bowling Green State University / OhioLINK, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1522853726757563.

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Idini, Antonio Giovanni 1958. "Detecting colonialism: Detective fiction in Native American and Sardinian literatures." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1998. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/282702.

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This dissertation compares Native American and Sardinian literatures, focussing on literary renditions of detective stories, a recent development which has occurred in both literatures. The study is based on Procedura (1988), and Il terzo suono (1995), by Sardinian author Salvatore Mannuzzu; The Sharpest Sight (1992), Bone Game (1994), and Nightland (1996) by Choctaw-Cherokee-Irish writer Louis Owens. In both literatures the use of detective fiction embodies the authors' commentary regarding the discourse on colonization. Recurrent thematic features are the concern with history, notably the history of domination and the processes that have led to the present post-colonial condition. The drive towards solving the crime symbolizes and comments upon the necessity of addressing the history of colonization, past and present, both of the land and its people. All the novels included in this study elaborate the basic features of the genre in innovative ways that offer significant commentaries on the condition of these two colonized peoples. The truth at the end of the narration is broken down to a multiplicity of competing narratives. The dispossession and exploitation of ancestral land are textually structured as crimes which further parallel and comment upon the murder of human beings. Also, the characters of the detectives are pivotal for the embodiment of a critique of the classic anthropological model. The gathering of data in order to offer a 'scientific' version of the truth is an endeavor shared by criminal investigators as well as anthropologists, ethnologists and archaeologists. Since classic detective fiction and modern science developed simultaneously around the middle of nineteenth century, it is not coincidental that post-colonial authors of detective fiction feel the necessity to address the self-appointed superiority of so-called scientific discourse. As both cultures have been commodified as objects to be studied by external social scientists, Mannuzzu's and Owens's refusal to depict a univocal solution is also indicative of the clash between definitions elaborated by outsiders versus forms of traditional knowledge within the cultural group.

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Shaver, Lisa M. "Identity Issues : Situating the Self in Contemporary Native American Literature." Thesis, University of Essex, 2008. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.495560.

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The following work is an examination of the way in which Contemporary Native American authors from the United States depict the search for self within their novels. Included in this thesis is an 'Introduction' that examines the development of a sense of identity that is unique to Nat!ve Americans, as well as those factors that shape and in some instances, hinder the development ofsuch a self-perception, such as stereotypes and US government policies. In order to provide a thorough examination of this particular topic, this work examines novels from three Native American authors with varying tribal backgrounds and experiences. These authors include Sherman Alexie, Susan Power and Greg Sarris. As each of these authors has vastly different ties and levels of involvement with their particular Native American heritages, this work is able to examine the differences that arise in the development ofNative self-perceptions when faced with environmental and social variances. In doing so, this work not only highlights the many different forms that Native American self-perceptions take, but also the multiple paths that lead to the development of these identities.

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Charles-Galley, Marie Line J. "A Glimpse of African Identity Through the Lens of Togolese Literature." Thesis, University of Missouri - Columbia, 2019. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=13877137.

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Togo, this small West African nation, is still relative unknown, even in today's jet set world. The Western world is only now discovering the numerous advances Togo has made in it social and economic policies, but most of all in its political conjectures. After its Independence on April 27, 1960, Togo had barely begun its journey to democracy when the dictatorship of Gnassingbe Eyadema became the yoke of the people for over thirty-one years, on April 14th, 1967. The consequences of the stranglehold exercised by Gnassingbe was to shut the nation's cultural growth and cause the people to close in onto themselves and build a protective barrier between themselves and the rest of the world.

Yet, Togo had great beginnings. It was one of the pioneers of Sub-Saharan literature, publishing in 1929 one of the first true African novels still read today. In 1929, native son Felix Couchoro, was among the first Sub-Saharan authors to write a novel which gave agency to an African protagonist in a story set in Africa, with an African-themed plot, and with a conclusion that aimed at rethinking African society. Couchoro was the first to look deeply into his culture and the social identity of his nation. He brought forth suggestions that would help in Togo's growth and insure its successful battle for Independence.

In doing so, however, Couchoro also created great controversy around a subject which continues to plague not only Togelese people, but all Africans who feel pulled in two directions: preserving their authentic traditional customs while taking an active part in the modern world, through economic improvements as well as technological advances. In this dissertation, I will first study Couchoro's flagship novel which was the starting point of this quest for a modern identity, then analyze how subsequent Togolese writers have taken up Couchoro's legacy.

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Strong, Brooklynn. "Understanding Native American education a qualitative literature review examining Native American values, boarding schools, and multicultural education and counseling /." Menomonie, WI : University of Wisconsin--Stout, 2006. http://www.uwstout.edu/lib/thesis/2006/2006strongb.pdf.

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Knight, Tatiana E. "A Critique of the Representation of Violence in American Literature:." FIU Digital Commons, 2012. http://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/etd/751.

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The purpose of this thesis was to draw new insights on Thomas Berger’s classic American novel, Little Big Man, and his representation of fictional violence that is a substantial aspect of any text on the Indian Wars and “Custer’s Last Stand”. History’s major world wars led to shifts in the political climate and a noted change in the way that violence was represented in the arts. Historical, fictional, and cinematic treatments of “Custer’s Last Stand” and violence were each considered in relation to the text. Berger's version of the famed story is a revision of history that shows the protagonist as a dual-member of two violent societies. The thesis concluded that Berger’s updated American legends and unique “white renegade” character led to a representation of violence that spoke to the current state of affairs in 1964 when the world was becoming much more hostile and chaotic place.

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Hatt, Graceanne M. "Recreating identity: Acts of transcendence and resistance in Native American literature." Thesis, Wichita State University, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10057/2409.

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The Native American novel is inherently a “cross-cultural” device with roots both in the western written tradition and Indigenous oral tradition; a mix that oftentimes makes these novels difficult for readers, especially non-Native ones. What makes these texts particularly challenging is that the need for clarification in what and who an American Indian is becomes central to the text, and the way in which myth is enmeshed within the text plays a crucial role in answering that question. In this thesis essay, I examine two broad reoccurring thematic trends that emerge from Native American literature to help illuminate the ways in which myth is used in the project of recreating identity. Through the use of literary illustrations that represent each of these broad trends or strains, I will examine the means through which movement either away from or towards the larger cultural narrative aids the reader in recognizing the issues connected with each of these strains, and how that movement achieves the ends of either healing or subversion. Next I compare the two strains showing how myth as part of oral tradition is interwoven into a palatable western literary form, or how through the use of postmodern devices it is used as part of historical revisionism. The result of this analysis reveals recreating identity is not just a project for Native Americans, but non-Natives as well, as the reader is confronted with issues about the “other” that is a part and a genesis of our own heritage.
Thesis (M.A.)--Wichita State University, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Dept. of English

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Monroe, Suzanne Stolz. "Images of Native American female protagonists in children's literature, 1928-1988." Diss., The University of Arizona, 1988. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/184580.

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The purpose of this study has been to determine prevalent images of Native American female protagonists in Children's Literature from 1928-88, and to note trends in images during the past 60 years. A content analysis of 60 picture books and chapter books has been completed and presented in a descriptive and interpretative format. The most prevalent image of Native American female protagonists in children's literature is a traditional one. This image is consistent throughout the literature from 1928-88, and appears to be represented by both Native American and non-Native American authors and illustrators. Traditional-transitional images appeared between 1957 and 1967, while contemporary images first appeared in the 1970s. In general, the Native American female protagonists in this population of books are presented as strong and positive characters expressing a wide range of emotions. They are named, identified by tribe, and depicted as having multiple skills and interests. They are active and most often appear in rural and outdoor settings within the context of the extended family. Many protagonists are of Southwestern heritage, often depicted as Navajo or Pueblo girls of ages 4-13. Although female protagonists in this population of books are generally characterized as strong and positive, there are still too few books representing strong female Native American images in the whole of children's literature. This research confirms previous findings that Native American male protagonists outnumber female protagonists approximately 10 to 1. Native American authors and illustrators have created approximately one-third of the books in this population. There are 19 Native American authors and 21 Native American illustrators. The earliest books were published by large press; Native press has increased publication since 1975. This research confirms the need for more books featuring Native American female protagonists; more books depicting protagonists from diverse tribal backgrounds, in contemporary settings, urban environments and literate contexts; more books building on the oral tradition and legends of the Southwestern tribes; more involvement of Native American authors, illustrators and publishers in children's literature; and more mentoring of Native American developing authors.

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Kachur, Curtis. "The Freedom and Privacy of an Indian Boarding School's Sports Field and Student Athletes Resistance to Assimilation." Bowling Green State University / OhioLINK, 2017. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=bgsu1510234437881951.

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Al-Khaldi, Mubarak Rashed. "Other narratives : representations of history in four postcolonial Native American novels /." The Ohio State University, 1998. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu148795220810831.

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Vollaro, Daniel Richard. "Origins and Orthodoxy: Anthologies of American Literature and American History." Digital Archive @ GSU, 2008. http://digitalarchive.gsu.edu/english_diss/36.

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This dissertation examines how the new “multicultural phase” anthologies of American literature treat American history. Anthologies of American literature are more historical, more diverse, and more multidisciplinary than ever before, but they have over-extended themselves in both their historical and representational reach. They are not, despite their diversity and historicism, effective vehicles for promoting critical discussions of American history in the classroom. Chapter One outlines a brief history of anthologies of American literature, while also introducing the terminology and methodology used in this study. Chapter Two explores the role of the headnote as a vehicle for American history in anthologies by focusing on headnotes to Abraham Lincoln in multiple anthologies. Chapter Three examines how anthologies frame Native American origin stories for their readers. Chapter Four focuses on the issues raised by anthologizing texts originally composed in Spanish, and Chapter Five argues for a transnational broadening of the “slavery theme” in anthologies to include Barbary captivity narratives and texts that reference Indian slavery.

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Fauth, Norienne Courtney. "Excavating the past : (re)writing continuity in postcolonial Native American and Jamaican literature /." Diss., Connect to a 24 p. preview or request complete full text in PDF format. Access restricted to UC campuses, 1999. http://wwwlib.umi.com/cr/ucsd/fullcit?p9936838.

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Lumsden, Paul. "The bear in selected American, Canadian, and Native literature, a pedagogical symbol linking humanity and nature." Thesis, National Library of Canada = Bibliothèque nationale du Canada, 1997. http://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk3/ftp04/nq23022.pdf.

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Emery, Jacqueline. "Writing against Erasure: Native American Boarding School Students and the Periodical Press, 1880-1920." Diss., Temple University Libraries, 2011. http://cdm16002.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p245801coll10/id/139150.

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English
Ph.D.
This dissertation seeks to expand our conception of what constitutes Native American letters by examining how the periodical became a prominent form in Native American literary production in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With its focus on the boarding school, Writing against Erasure provides insight into the context in which students first learned how to make complex and sophisticated choices in print. Within the contested disciplinary space of the boarding school, the periodical press functioned as a site for competing discourses on assimilation. Whereas school authorities used the white-run school newspapers to publicize their programs of cultural erasure, students used the student-run school newspapers to defend and preserve Native American identity and culture in the face of the assimilationist imperatives of the boarding schools and the dominant culture. Writing against Erasure highlights the formative impact of students' experiences with the boarding school press on the periodical practices and rhetorical strategies of two well-known Native American literary figures, Zitkala-Sa and Charles Eastman. By treating the periodical writings of these two prominent boarding school graduates alongside the periodical writings produced by boarding school students while they were still at school, Writing against Erasure provides a literary genealogy that reveals important continuities between these writers' strategic and political uses of the periodical press. Writing against Erasure argues that Native American boarding school students and graduates used the periodical press not to promote the interests of school authorities as some scholars have argued, but rather to preserve their cultural traditions, to speak out on behalf of indigenous interests, and to form a pan-Indian community at the turn of the twentieth century.
Temple University--Theses

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Stout, Mary Ann 1954. "Early Native American women writers: Pauline Johnson, Zitkala-Sa, Mourning Dove." Thesis, The University of Arizona, 1992. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/292027.

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Turn of the century Native American women's published writing is examined for the elements which presage contemporary Native American women's writing. In particular, three writers' works and biographies are examined in order to determine why they wrote, how they wrote and what they wrote. Pauline Johnson, Zitkala-Sa and Mourning Dove made early contributions to the field of Native American women's literature.

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Schein, Marie-Madeleine. "The Evolution of Survival as Theme in Contemporary Native American Literature: from Alienation to Laughter." Thesis, University of North Texas, 1994. https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc278840/.

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With the publication of his Pulitzer Prize winning novel, House Made of Dawn. N. Scott Momaday ended a three-decade hiatus in the production of works written by Native American writers, and contributed to the renaissance of a rich literature. The critical acclaim that the novel received helped to establish Native American literature as a legitimate addition to American literature at large and inspired other Native Americans to write. Contemporary Native American literature from 1969 to 1974 focuses on the themes of the alienated mixed-blood protagonist and his struggle to survive, and the progressive return to a forgotten or rejected Indian identity. For example, works such as Leslie Silko's Ceremony and James Welch's Winter in the Blood illustrate this dual focal point. As a result, scholarly attention on these works has focused on the theme of struggle to the extent that Native American literature can be perceived as necessarily presenting victimized characters. Yet, Native American literature is essentially a literature of survival and continuance, and not a literature of defeat. New writers such as Louise Erdrich, Hanay Geiogamah, and Simon Ortiz write to celebrate their Indian heritage and the survival of their people, even though they still use the themes of alienation and struggle. The difference lies in what they consider to be the key to survival: humor. These writers posit that in order to survive, Native Americans must learn to laugh at themselves and at their fate, as well as at those who have victimized them through centuries of oppression. Thus, humor becomes a coping mechanism that empowers Native Americans and brings them from survival to continuance.

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Curry, Elizabeth. "Refiguring the Animal: Race, Posthumanism, and Modernism." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2019. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/24546.

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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.

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Marubbio, M. Elise 1963. "The edge of the abyss: Metamorphosis as reality in contemporary Native American literature." Thesis, The University of Arizona, 1993. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/291692.

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The edge of the abyss: Metamorphosis as reality in contemporary Native American literature, approaches the concept of metamorphosis from a metaphysical and philosophical perspective as a culturally defined reality. It focuses on the works of contemporary Native American writers: Leslie Silko, Scott Momaday, Gerald Vizenor, and Louise Erdrich, who address the metamorphic properties of Time and the metamorphic abilities of Man as a continuing link to the supernatural and natural worlds through stories which descend from a history of oral traditions. The Edge of the Abyss explores the use of language and stories as a cultural survival technique for the retention of tribal ideology and world view. It addresses the fine line which exists between Western and Native American concepts of reality in order to re-define metamorphosis within a cultural context. This thesis uses an interdisciplinary approach utilizing anthropological, sociological, shamanistic, literary, and cultural materials in a comparative analysis.

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Niehaus, Emma Elizabeth. "Alternate auralities on the American frontier| Resounding the Indian in the American Western film." Thesis, University of Colorado at Boulder, 2016. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10124043.

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The Western film presents its viewers with a supposed historical depiction of America’s “Great West,” set during the period of the United States’ westward expansion in the nineteenth century. However, the Western film reiterates a mythologized version of the American West that relies on archetypal themes, events, and characters through the synthesis of story, image and music. This paper examines the Western’s most problematic archetype, the “Indian.” The Indian’s liminal role in American mythology will be examined through the analysis of the aural recoding and obscuring of authentic Native American auralities according to the sonic power structures of the Euro-American soundscape, and subsequently, how this aural recoding informs the role of the “Indian” in three successful Western films from the Western’s heyday, Red River (1948), Broken Arrow (1950), and The Searchers (1956).

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Teutsch, John Matthew. ""We Wish to Plead Our Own Cause"| Rhetorical Links between Native Americans and African Americans during the 1820s and 1830s." Thesis, University of Louisiana at Lafayette, 2014. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=3622958.

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This dissertation challenges the traditional histories of rhetoric in early America by examining how Scottish Enlightenment rhetoric affected those outside of the white, male-dominated social hierarchy of the early eighteenth century through an examination of works by white women, Native Americans, and African Americans that confluence around national calls for Native American removal and African colonization. Scholars have shown the influence of Scottish Enlightenment rhetoric on the early Republic, specifically the rhetoric of George Campbell and Hugh Blair, and historians have shown the relationships between abolitionists, Native Americans, and African Americans during the nineteenth century. However, these scholars have not shown how writers deployed Scottish Enlightenment rhetoric in these debates. By examining writings by Lydia Maria Child and Catharine Maria Sedgwick, I show how both women incorporated the ideas of sympathy in their works about Native Americans and African Americans. I also explore how activists such as William Apess, David Walker, and Hosea Easton all implemented Campbell's rhetorical ideas into their arguments and discuss how their rhetorical practices can be seen in relationship to one another. Drawing on Blair's thoughts on taste, I explore how newspaper editors John Russwurm and Elias Boudinot viewed taste and how they presented their views to their African American and Cherokee readers respectively. Looking forward, I conclude with a brief examination of the poet Albery Allson Whitman who wrote epic poems centered on the confluence of Native American and African American experiences. Overall, this dissertation works to show how those outside of the social hierarchy wielded rhetorical principles taught in the hallowed halls of the university, and it also explores the understudied links between activists who fought for Native American and African American rights during the early nineteenth century.

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Moss, Maria. "We've been here before women in creation myths and contemporary literature of the Native American southwest /." Münster : Lit, 1993. http://catalog.hathitrust.org/api/volumes/oclc/30100337.html.

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Klotz, Kurt. "'This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine' : Edgar Allan Poe, Native Americans and property." Thesis, University of Glasgow, 2011. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/2647/.

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This thesis investigates depictions of male dismemberment at Anglo and Native American contact sites in the tales of Edgar Allan Poe. It argues for Poe’s subscription to a traditional theology that posits Neoplatonic concepts of the soul as mandatory for the constitution of rational humanity, and contends that he looks critically from this perspective at the contingency of national citizenship on property ownership in Jacksonian America. This investigation therefore involves an analysis of the link between property and national subjectivity, with emphasis on the recurrent trope in contemporary literature of the male body dismembered by ‘Indian warfare’, and how this body represents early America’s uncertain claim to its national territory and, by extension, the constituting condition of property. This thesis also assesses epistemological and religious formations in Poe’s fiction. Poe’s tales often express a theological anxiety, with tensions created as the knowledge systems that define Poe’s subjectivities subordinate spirituality to empirical mensuration and representation. Dramatizing this shift from teleology to epistemology and its disarticulating effect on the self are Poe’s ‘married women’ stories. Keeping in mind links between soteriological paradigms and identity construction, methodologies are partially organized around Poe’s presentation of women in his essays and tales, with particular emphasis on ‘The Poetic Principle’ and ‘Berenice’. The interpretive apparatus gained by historical contextualization and the assessment of Poe’s epistemological and religious formations is then mobilized towards reading the disarticulate male body as a nexus of Poe’s concerns about property ownership, epistemology and theology, and analyzing his tales pertaining to colonial contact, particularly: ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, ‘Morning on the Wissahiccon’, ‘The Man That Was Used Up’, ‘The Journal of Julius Rodman’, and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.

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Tilton, Martha Elizabeth. "To Happiness." Cincinnati, Ohio : University of Cincinnati, 2008. http://www.ohiolink.edu/etd/view.cgi?ucin1204297800.

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Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Cincinnati, 2008.
Advisor: Don Bogen PhD (Committee Chair). Title from electronic thesis title page (viewed Sep.4, 2008). Keywords: poetry; Paula Gunn Allen; Adrienne Rich; trauma theory; cartographic theory; Native American. Includes abstract. Includes bibliographical references.

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Byrd, Gayle. "The Presence and Use of the Native American and African American Oral Trickster Traditions in Zitkala-Sa's Old Indian Legends and American Indian Stories and Charles Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman." Diss., Temple University Libraries, 2014. http://cdm16002.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/ref/collection/p245801coll10/id/258606.

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English
Ph.D.
The Presence and Use of the Native American and African American Oral Trickster Traditions in Zitkala-Sa's Old Indian Legends and American Indian Stories and Charles Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman My dissertation examines early Native American and African American oral trickster tales and shows how the pioneering authors Zitkala-Sa (Lakota) and Charles W. Chesnutt (African American) drew on them to provide the basis for a written literature that critiqued the political and social oppression their peoples were experiencing. The dissertation comprises 5 chapters. Chapter 1 defines the meaning and role of the oral trickster figure in Native American and African American folklore. It also explains how my participation in the Native American and African American communities as a long-time storyteller and as a trained academic combine to allow me to discern the hidden messages contained in Native American and African American oral and written trickster literature. Chapter 2 pinpoints what is distinctive about the Native American oral tradition, provides examples of trickster tales, explains their meaning, purpose, and cultural grounding, and discusses the challenges of translating the oral tradition into print. The chapter also includes an analysis of Jane Schoolcraft's short story "Mishosha" (1827). Chapter 3 focuses on Zitkala-Sa's Old Indian Legends (1901) and American Indian Stories (1921). In the legends and stories, Zitkala-Sa is able to preserve much of the mystical, magical, supernatural, and mythical quality of the original oral trickster tradition. She also uses the oral trickster tradition to describe and critique her particular nineteenth-century situation, the larger historical, cultural, and political context of the Sioux Nation, and Native American oppression under the United States government. Chapter 4 examines the African American oral tradition, provides examples of African and African American trickster tales, and explains their meaning, purpose, and cultural grounding. The chapter ends with close readings of the trickster tale elements embedded in William Wells Brown's Clotel; or, The President's Daughter (1853), Harriett Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), and Martin R. Delany's Blake, or the Huts of America (serialized 1859 - 1862). Chapter 5 shows how Charles Chesnutt's The Conjure Woman rests upon African-derived oral trickster myths, legends, and folklore preserved in enslavement culture. Throughout the Conjure tales, Chesnutt uses the supernatural as a metaphor for enslaved people's resistance, survival skills and methods, and for leveling the ground upon which Blacks and Whites struggled within the confines of the enslavement and post-Reconstruction South. Native American and African American oral and written trickster tales give voice to their authors' concerns about the social and political quality of life for themselves and for members of their communities. My dissertation allows these voices a forum from which to "speak."
Temple University--Theses

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Carr, Helen. "The poetics and politics of primitivism : some United States interpretations of native American literary traditions." Thesis, University of Essex, 1990. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.290613.

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Piamonte, Stephanie. "The Criminological Imagination: Mills, Reflexive Analysis, & Richard Wright's "Native Son"." Thesis, University of Ottawa (Canada), 2010. http://hdl.handle.net/10393/28780.

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The promise of Mills's (1959) classic sociological imagination for criminology is revisited and assumptions about the adequacy and usefulness of fiction in terms of its analytical and explanatory potential are challenged. The criminological imagination, as a quality of mind, analytic framework and method of knowledge production, provides an ideal meta-framework with which to consider fiction. The theories of Jack Katz (1988) and the symbolic interactionists further develop Mills's concept of biography, while the Birmingham School (Clarke, Hall, Jefferson, & Roberts, 2006) expands on Mills's concept of society; integrating these within the meta-framework of the criminological imagination produces a reflexive analysis of Native Son, a classic novel by Richard Wright (2005). In so doing, fiction is demonstrated to be a legitimate object of criminological inquiry that challenges criminological conventions, clarifies and critiques criminological concepts, and creates and communicates criminological knowledge.

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Turner, Jesse Patrick. "Inventing a transactional classroom: An Upward Bound, Native American writing community." Diss., The University of Arizona, 2000. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/279997.

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This teacher-researcher study examines the experiences of secondary students in a unique Upward Bound program exclusively for Native Americans. The study followed the reading and writing experiences of these students during a 2-year period. The focus of the dissertation is on the literacy experiences of students as they were exposed to a rich writing program that used culture as the invitation to literacy. The investigation follows both teacher researcher and students during the emergence of a transactional curriculum that closely followed the Indian Nations at Risk Task Force recommendations for Native American learners. The study enlisted 20 Native American students who were already participating in the Upward Bound program. This program was chosen because it was the only such program in the United States exclusively for Native American students. These students attended public high schools in Tucson, Arizona, or high schools on the Tohono O'odham reservation outside Tucson. The curriculum focus is on transactional literacy experiences and inquiry. These focuses and the concept of teacher as researcher provide the theoretical framework. This framework illuminates curriculum as it attempts to transform the educational experiences of Native American adolescents immersed in writing experiences rooted in Native American ways of viewing the world. This analysis of one distinctive writing class suggests that the often documented institutionally-produced factors that contribute to Native American adolescent failure and discontinuity in secondary writing settings can be overcome when Native American culture is not only valued, but embraced as the focus of literacy in school. This dissertation provides insights into the uniqueness of Native American school experiences and extends the current body of literature on Native American education by considering culture as the invitation into literacy and the teacher as change agent. This study also asks others to pick up the torch. Finally, teacher researcher generated recommendations provide an opportunity for teachers themselves to begin the process of changing the discontinuity of learning often felt by Native Americans in their own classrooms. These recommendations include five conditions for an emerging curriculum: (a) creating space for transactional dialogues, (b) sharing responsibility, (c) trusting inquiry, (d) using multiple sign systems, and (e) accessing personal and social ways of knowing. We need not wait for institutional change to make a difference. As has often been stated in educational research, the teacher makes the difference.

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Stoffle, Richard W., John Olmsted, and Michael Evans. "Literature Review and Ethnohistory of Native American Occupancy and Use of the Yucca Mountain Area." Science Applications International Corporation, 1990. http://hdl.handle.net/10150/271455.

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This report presents a review of the literature concerning Native American occupancy and use of the Yucca Mountain area and vicinity. It draws on a wide range of material, including early traveler reports, government documents, ethnographic and historical works, and local newspapers. The report complements two other concurrent studies, one focused on the cultural resources of Native American people in the study area and the other an ethnobotanical study of plant resources used by Native American people in the study area. Both concurrent studies are based on interviews with Native American people. The literature review was designed to contribute to the understanding of the presence of Native American people in the Yucca Mountain area. A review of the existing literature about the Yucca Mountain area and southern Nye County, supplemented by the broader literature about the Great Basin, has verified three aspects of the study design. First, the review has aided in assessing the completeness of the list of Native American ethnic groups that have traditional or historical ties to the site. Second, it has aided in the production of a chronology of Native American activities that occurred on or near the site during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Third, it has helped to identify the location of cultural resources, including burials and other archaeological sites, in the study area and vicinity.

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Honea, Benjamin D. "Comanche Boys." UKnowledge, 2016. http://uknowledge.uky.edu/english_etds/44.

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Comanche Boys is a novel that was written and revised during Benjamin Honea’s time at the University of Kentucky. The novel focuses on Brandon, who lives in rural southwest Oklahoma, and how the arrival of two people in his life, one old and one new, changes his future irrevocably. Taking place at the intersections of modern American and Native American life, the narrative explores history, culture, mythology, faith, despair, racism, poverty, vengeance, and justice. The struggles of the past and present, the lost and reclaimed, propel and pervade the lives of the characters.

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Keeler, Kyle B. KEELER. ""The earth is a tomb and man a fleeting vapour": The Roots of Climate Change in Early American Literature." Kent State University / OhioLINK, 2018. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=kent152327594367199.

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Ray, Sarah Jaquette 1976. "The ecological other: Indians, invalids, and immigrants in U.S. environmental thought and literature." Thesis, University of Oregon, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/1794/10352.

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xi, 233 p. : ill. A print copy of this thesis is available through the UO Libraries. Search the library catalog for the location and call number.
This dissertation argues that a fundamental paradox underlies U.S. environmentalism: even as it functions as a critique of dominant social and economic practices, environmentalism simultaneously reinforces many social hierarchies, especially with regard to race, immigration, and disability, despite its claims to recognize the interdependence of human and ecological well-being. This project addresses the related questions: In what ways does environmentalism--as a code of behavioral imperatives and as a set of rhetorical strategies--ironically play a role in the exploitation of land and communities? Along what lines--class, race, ability, gender, nationality, age, and even "sense of place"--do these environmental codes and discourses delineate good and bad environmental behavior? I contend that environmentalism emerged in part to help legitimize U.S. imperial ambitions and support racialized and patriarchal conceptions of national identity. Concern about "the environment" made anxieties about communities of color more palatable than overt racism. Furthermore, "environmentalism's hidden attachments" to whiteness and Manifest Destiny historically aligned the movement with other repressive ideologies, such as eugenics and strict anti-immigration. These "hidden attachments" exist today, yet few have analyzed their contemporary implications, a gap this project fills. In three chapters, I detail nineteenth-century environmentalism's influence on contemporary environmental thought. Each of these three illustrative chapters investigates a distinct category of environmentalism's "ecological others": Native Americans, people with disabilities, and undocumented immigrants. I argue that environmentalism defines these groups as "ecological others" because they are viewed as threats to nature and to the American national body politic. The first illustrative chapter analyzes Native American land claims in Leslie Marmon Silko's 1991 novel, Almanac of the Dead . The second illustrative chapter examines the importance of the fit body in environmental literature and U.S. adventure culture. In the third illustrative chapter, I integrate literary analysis with geographical theories and methods to investigate national security, wilderness protection, and undocumented immigration in the borderland. In a concluding fourth chapter, I analyze works of members of the excluded groups discussed in the first three chapters to show how they transform mainstream environmentalism to bridge social justice and ecological concerns. This dissertation contains previously published material.
Committee in charge: Shari Huhndorf, Chairperson, English; Louise Westling, Member, English; David Vazquez, Member, English; Juanita Sundberg, Member, Not from U of 0 Susan Hardwick, Outside Member, Geography

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46

Farrington, Tom Joseph William. "'Breaking and Entering' : Sherman Alexie's urban Indian literature." Thesis, University of Edinburgh, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/1842/10589.

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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.

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Dadey, Bruce. "Rhetorics Rising: The Recovery of Rhetorical Traditions in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn." Thesis, University of Waterloo, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/10012/2789.

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This study suggests, through a rhetorical analysis of the role of orators and oration in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man and N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn, 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, Invisible Man and House Made of Dawn 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.

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Calhoun, Jamie Dawn. "Alluding to Protest: Resistance in Post War American Literature." Miami University / OhioLINK, 2009. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=miami1250023062.

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Lacy, Sarah M. "Writing Through the Lower Frequencies: Interpreting the Unnaming and Naming Process within Richard Wright's Native Son and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man." Cleveland State University / OhioLINK, 2017. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=csu1494341009717745.

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Potts, Henry M. "Native American values and traditions and the novel : ambivalence shall speak the story." Thesis, McGill University, 1996. http://digitool.Library.McGill.CA:80/R/?func=dbin-jump-full&object_id=26754.

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The commitment to community shared by Native American authors such as N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, and Louise Erdrich is partially evinced by each author's readiness to inscribe in novel form the values and traditions of the tribal community or communities with which he/she is closely associated. Many students of the novel will attest to its pliant, sometimes transmutable nature; nevertheless, as this study attempts to make clear, there are some reasons why Native American authors should reconsider using the novel as a means to express their tribal communities' values and traditions. Unambivalent prescriptions, however, seem more suited to the requirements of law or medicine; and so this study also examines some of the reasons why Native American authors should continue to embrace this relatively "new" art form persistently termed the novel.

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Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Native American Literature'

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