| This study analyzes the use of traditional mythic/folkloric trickster figures and discourse in contemporary texts by four influential U.S. authors. Trickster figures have appeared in U.S. literature with increasing frequency since the 1960s civil rights era. While recognizing the ongoing transformation from a hegemonic to heterogeneous U.S. cultural mindset since that period, literary analysis to date has not yet adequately revealed the sociopolitical implications of these trickster texts. Using anthropological sources to elaborate social problems and solutions (key concerns of traditional trickster narratives), this study analyzes closely four works of U.S. trickster literature: Gerald Vizenor's Summer in the Spring: Anishinaabe Lyric Poems and Stories (1970, 1981, 1993); Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow (1983); Maxine Hong Kingston's Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book (1989); and Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead (1991). Vizenor's is a folkloric collection, while the other texts are novels. For creative literature that features rearticulated trickster figures or narrative patterns from a trickster discourse tradition, anthropological research reveals that these figures/discourses facilitate thinking across boundaries. Through their texts, Vizenor, Marshall, Kingston, and Silko reject long-standing European American bounds of U.S. culture and history as well as delimiting definitions of what constitutes successful American ethnic literary production. These mediational trickster texts provide narrative opportunities for readers to transform delimiting conceptualizations of U.S. society and culture in order to create a future in which we acknowledge and engage what has always been a heterogeneous New World. |
