| This thesis is a literary and literary historical analysis of Leslie Marmon Silko's 1977 novel, Ceremony, situated primarily within a postcolonial theoretical framework. The launching point is an interrogation of Kenneth Lincoln's 1983 book, Native American Renaissance, in which he marked the historical arrival of a distinctly Native American literary canon in 1969. The basic theory, which guides this thesis project and my own reading of Ceremony, is that Native American Renaissance has compelled critics to interpret early-Renaissance texts within an established temporal framework, encouraging literary criticism that builds on a coherent historical narrative pertaining more often to ideas about the canon itself than to individual texts. Drawing on a chronological sample of the secondary criticism on Ceremony, in which I find the postcolonial motives of the book have been mostly ignored or even refuted, I attempt to document the changes that have taken place over nearly forty years of criticism and, based on this body of literature, offer my own rereading of Ceremony. |
