Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition

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Gerald Vizenor, the most prolific Native American writer of this century, has produced more than twenty-five books in genres as varied as fiction, journalism, haiku, and literary theory. The first book-length study devoted to this important author, Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition lays the groundwork essential for understanding his complex work. Kimberly M. Blaeser begins with an examination of Vizenor's concept of Native American oral culture and his unique incorporation of oral tradition in the written word. She then explicates Vizenor's method of linking the traditional oral aesthetic with reader-response theories and details Vizenor's efforts to produce a form of writing that resists static meaning, involves the writer in the creation of the literary moment, and invites political action. She also explores the place of Vizenor's work within the larger contexts of contemporary tribal literature, Native American scholarship, and critical theory. Blaeser's is the first study to reveal the full importance of haiku in Vizenor's work. His poetry, which draws equally from Zen aesthetics and Ojibway dream songs, contains concise, economical descriptions, made up equally of absence and presence - a style characteristic of Vizenor's writing in other genres as well. Based upon scholarship, close reading, and interviews with Vizenor himself, and written by a Native scholar of Vizenor's own tribe, this book explicates Vizenor's ideas, methods, and forms, making even his most sophisticated arguments accessible to the general reader.