Ethnographic criticism and Native American fiction: Cultural texts, textual culture in the novels of James Welch

My project examines the processes of discipline formation in studies of Native American fiction using the first three novels of the widely acclaimed writer James Welch—Winter in the Blood (1974), The Death of Jim Loney (1979), and Fools Crow (1986). Through Welch's diverse works, I attend to two levels of critical response: how critics make larger claims about approaches to Native American literature more generally, and how they share what I call an ethnographic mode of criticism defined by its parallels with anthropology and its use of ethnographic materials. I show how the ethnographic approach's structuring of the dominant critical readings obscures the narratives' explorations of identity and textuality that range beyond the preservation of a pure, timeless, traditional Indianness. Reading the criticism alongside the novels allows me to expand the boundaries of study to include analysis of critical motivations, strategies, and effects; to expose the problems and dangers of an unexamined adoption of an ethnographic approach; and to analyze the real-world implications of literary criticism for the larger issues of representation so critical in minority studies.