AUFGEHOBENE WELTEN: ORALITY AND WORLD VIEW IN THE FICTIONAL WORKS OF N. SCOTT MOMADAY, LESLIE MARMON SILKO, AND JAMES WELCH (NATIVE AMERICAN)

The fictional works of three major contemporary native American authors, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, and James Welch are examined individually and comparatively for evidence of (1) oral noetic (i.e., mental, intellectual) structural organization and (2) specific tribal and Western cultural world views.; Novels included in the study are House Made of Dawn (Momaday), Ceremony (Silko), Winter in the Blood, and The Death of Jim Loney (Welch). Short stories by Leslie Silko are also included: "The Man to Send Rain Clouds," "Tony's Story," "Yellow Woman," among others. Subsidiary reference is also made to Momaday's The Names and The Way to Rainy Mountain.; The dissertation argues that such works as these are in effect translations, not of texts, but of text-generating systems (world views). Cultural world views and oral noesis feature prominently in all of these works and differ significantly from one another as well as from Western world view.; Close readings of these works reveal that Momaday utilizes elements from Pueblo, Navajo and Western world views, but the effectiveness of his approach is limited by its fragmentariness and inconsistency as well as by interference from his own Kiowa-derived world view. In contrast, Silko creates internally consistent fictional worlds informed by her Laguna Pueblo tradition. Silko also draws on other cultural traditions, but successfully integrates them into a coherent, artistically compelling pattern. Welch depicts a world where few traces of the Plains material culture survive, but where traditional concepts of time and relationship still function as vaguely-intuited ideals. Experience is fragmented in Welch's novels and his protagonists find it virtually impossible to establish or maintain the deeply emotional links with the past that are the essence of sacred or spiral time.; The study concludes that a careful comparative examination of world views as cultural and literary phenomena is a useful critical approach to works of Native American fiction and, moreover, that such an approach can lead to insights into these texts which are not likely to emerge from analyses using strictly Eurocentric literary critical approaches.