Writing in the oral tradition : the crisis of self representation in the American native literature : a postmodern reading of Gerald's Vizenor`s Bearheart : the Heirship Chronicles

Abstract EN

In presenting a native American myth that blends with a postmodern fictional universe, Gerald Vizenor's Bearheart: The Heirship Chronicles has remained challenging for readers who endeavor to fit it into a paradigm of Western criticism and literature.

The particular postmodern substance of Bearheart breaks from modern trends in theory, literature and history.

Even though the narrative conveys an oral tradition, clearly in its word game, intertextuality, structurless plot and characterization, Bearheart invokes the "upsetting" of many notions of truth, identity, language, cultural and literary authority, and authorship.

This is posed against not only the theoretical structure of the Western literary text but also against the "cultural specificity" of some Indian values that constitute what Vizenor's calls "tribal creeds." Vizenor's presentation is complex as it also threatens different levels of "terminal theoretical creeds." Whether literary or nonliterary, sacred or secular, oral or textual, tribal or non-tribal, terminal creeds have left sweeping impacts on modern and postmodern histories, ideologies and cultures.

Introduction: Vizenor's Post-modernized Oral Discourse of Writing Gerald Vizenor is a Native American novelist, poet, playwright, critic, and journalist who has become a controversial figure in the American literature.

Vizenor's writings incorporate polemic theoretical concepts, mythological and literary allusions, and poetry, as well as new visions of the Western mainstream literary theory.

Although he has ethnic and political reasons for refusing to commit to the well-established Western theoretical norms, or literary genre, being a mixed blood member of the Minnesota Chippewa tribe, his writing is clearly associated with Deconstruction as most manifestly represented by the Derridian Philosophy.

Even he is born into an oral culture, Vizenor is usually associated with its latest postmodern tradition, as evidenced by the critics he cites in his works, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Mikhaill Bakhtin, and Jean-Francois Loyotard to name a few.