Native American Renaissance generated a spate of critical essays on American Indian Fiction. But it has produced only a few books on this burgeoning field of inquiry. Rita Tripathy's Renewal Through Ritual offers a nuanced reading of the four famous American Indian/Native American novels: N. Scott Momady's House Made of Dawn, James Welch's Winter in the Blood, Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, and Louis Erdrich's Tracks. The book uncovers how these novelists successfully weave contemporary materials on the pattern of ancient myths. It is principally concerned with exploration and explication of these novels in the light of Native American/American Indian myths, ceremonies, and rituals. In a rich weave of materials drawn on fields as diverse as anthropology, psychology, history, cultural studies, Renewal Through Ritual examines the possibility of attaining psychic renewal through ritual enactment of certain dominant myths. The study touches upon subjects like ethnicity, acculturation, indigenous cultural memory, the trickster, and shamanism. As the book interprets the cosmic and social life of the tribes and shows how these novels read like ceremonial texts, it brings out the "tribal coherence" and "cultural competence" of these four eminent American Indian novelists.
Dr. Rita Tripathy is currently Reader in English at SB Women's College, Cuttack, Odisha (India). She received her M.A. and Ph.D. From Utkal University, Bhubaneshwar. A member of Odisha Education Service, Dr. Tripathy has taught in such premier colleges of the state as Ravenshaw College, Cuttack, BJB College, Bhubaneshwar and SB Women's College. Her research interests include race and ethic relations, nature writing and ecocriticism, and globalizing literacy studies. She has published essays/reviews in many scholarly journals.
This book argues for a critically nuanced reading of four significant Native American novels: N Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn, James Welch's Winter in the Blood, Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, and Louise Erdrich's Tracks. Owing inspirational allegiance to certain dominant myths and ceremonies in the American Indian oral tradition, these novelists seek to recover a lost power the power of attaining psychic renewal through performance of certain ancient rituals. All these novels are profoundly invested in the imbricated logic of memory, amnesia, ethnicity and identity. Despite certain critics' putative concern with these loaded issues, these four novels have not been explicated in terms of the recent theories on memory, amnesia, ethnicity and identity. Each chapter in this book first constructs and then explicates the texts in the light of these theories. No single theoretical model applies to the four novels under study. Drawing on the findings of Bierhorst Campbell, and Ruth Underhill the study seeks to adopt anthropological approach to literature. It also uses the idea and obsevations of literacy critics likes Andrew Weight, Kenneth Lincoln, Louis Owens, Allen Velic, and theorists like Jung, Lacan, Zizeck, Foucault and Pierre Nora. The focus here is on how the protagonists in House Made of Dawn, Winter in the Blood, Ceremony, and Tracks achieve psychic renewal through the ritual enactment of their relationship with the supernaturals. Writing, to these novelists, constitutes an artistic evocation of myths and ceremonies; their fiction betrays their inspirational allegiance to the great oral tradition. The myths in their works tell tales of the yore, but they remain vitally relevant to the modern times. Each of the novels here adopts the motif of renewal through ritual. The novels are ordered chronologically as they were published and each novel has been treated in an independent chapter. The chapters are divided into sections which permit construction of the theoretical framework followed by examination of the texts. Throughout the book, the expressions "Native American" and "American Indian" are used interchangeably. Chapter one offers a broad overview of myths and ceremonies. Meant to be a survey, it defines and discusses the basis of the myths and ceremonies, and examines its implications in different fictional contexts. Divided into three sections, the chapter deals with myths and ceremonies in general, myths and ceremonies with reference to Native American culture, and myths and ceremonies as the underpinnings in the process of the protagonists' renewal through ritual. Chapter two discusses the theories concerning memory, history, and the role of the artists in preserving and promoting cultural icons. It then examines in detail certain myths and ceremonies dramatized in The House made of Dawn. Chapter three deals with the problem of ethnicity and creative freedom in The Winter in the Blood. In the first section of the chapter theories concerning memory, amnesia and rupture of ethnicity are discussed. And then the novel is analyzed in the light of these theories. The chapter shows how Welch uses certain elements of the Native lore and transmutes them into a work of art. The myths and ceremonies examined here are vision quest, sweat bath, the pipe of peace and the practice of shamanism.
**Contents and Sample Pages**
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