'Mutual answerability': Aesthetics, ethics, transgredients from Mikhail Bakhtin to Lee Smith to Leslie Marmon Silko

The dissertation considers the implications of Mikhail Bakhtin's insistence both ethics and aesthetics and applies his theories to a cross-cultural study of two contemporary American, ethnic women writers.; The first major section outlines the foundation of the study by focusing on the theories of Bakhtin, including his position against the Kantian desire to remove one's self from the center of debate in order to determine "the supreme principal of morality." Bakhtin insisted on our understanding the "great dialogue" between ethics and aesthetics---practice and theory---and the content of the transgredient space between them. The novel, the only realistic genre, is defined and evaluated by its reflection of the dialogue among various levels of theoretical ideology and practical reality.; The second and third major sections center on two writers from the perspective of their different cultures, in a multi-leveled dialogue between writer and text, text and socio-historical context, and the two writers themselves. The two I am discussing here are marketed as distinctly Southern Appalachian (Lee Smith) and Southwestern Native (Leslie Marmon Silko). In order to determine the American context into which these writers have been placed, I have discussed the implications of both regional critical theory and the American critical theory and advertising practice that place both these writers into obviously "ethnic" categories.; The second chapter focuses on Lee Smith's novel The Devil's Dream , this writer's most finely crafted novel to date and the one of her novels that most successfully mirrors both the Appalachian culture of the novel and the novelist herself. In Bakhtin's terms, the major strength of The Devil's Dream is its formal unity, long noted as a characteristic of the Old South, if not the New.; The third chapter focuses on Leslie Silko's epic-novel hybrid Almanac of the Dead. In Bakhtin's terms, its major strength is its mimetic excellence-its reflection of a post-colonial cultural reality as seen by many Native-American scholars and some European-American scholars---through its enactment of the cyclical nature of history. The enactment, rather than the discussion, of cyclical history requires a degree of both formal and contextual unity that marks Almanac as one of the most successful of Bakhtinian novels.; My approach to literary studies focuses on mediation---how ethnic writers have negotiated the spaces between "American" and "ethnic-American" cultural and literary conventions. Bakhtin's perception of the great dialogue between ethics and aesthetics has given us a useful way to discuss the transgredient space between the form of the novel and its historical moment in order to understand better both the texts we read and the history we share.