Reworlding the word: Contemporary Native American novelists map the third space (Gerald Vizenor, Leslie Marmon Silko, Linda Hogan)

This dissertation addresses a new generation of Native American novels that participate in a significant shift in Native American fiction to a new level of complexity and a position of centrality in American literature. The study focuses on three novels---Gerald Vizenor's The Heirs of Columbus (1991), Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead (1991), and Linda Hogan's Solar Storms (1995)---which reflect a dialogic and mediational exchange between Native American and EuroAmerican discourses. While Vizenor, Silko, and Hogan retain themes of mixedblood and crosscultural identities characteristic of Native American fiction, they encompass these issues in a larger project of redefining and renegotiating what it means to be human in a world of shifting and multiple identities, to inhabit subjectivities, bodies, communities, and places that are continually being deconstructed and reconstructed. Their novels draw on complementarities between a reimagined traditional paradigm of interconnectedness and participation, reconstructed from tribal oral traditions, and the worldview emerging from the postmodern sciences of wholeness---quantum mechanics, holographic, chaos and complexity theories, and new biology---to realize a dynamic interpenetration of epistemologies and subjectivities of both separation and connection, modern and postmodern positions. They articulate a higher order complexity that enfolds oppositional, statically syncretic, and evolutionary models of cultural interaction by layering conceptual frames within a complex dynamic field that relates binary and analogic modes and thus offers a fullness of epistemological choices. These novels perform a "third space" of emergent paradigms and a "new orality" that alters the written word through innovative uses of language and image that "three-dimensionalize" and recontextualize printed text to bring it closer to the dynamic, participatory experience of a reimagined oral consciousness. Within that third space, these novels rewrite the world as "borderlands" and simultaneously remap that world as "home." By refracting critical theories that interface literature and science through "minor" lenses and voices, Vizenor, Silko and Hogan also make the universalizing theories of new science responsible to power dynamics of gender, class, race, ethnicity, and ecology, and thus more relevant to the ongoing lives of individuals and communities, human and non-human.