Saints, spirits, serpents, and souls: Amerindian, African, and European myth in the twentieth-century novel of the Americas

This dissertation studies the mythopoeic novels of six authors, equally distributed between North America and South America: three pairs of writers, one pair from the Native American tradition (Jose Maria Arguedas of Peru and Leslie Marmon Silko of the United States), one pair from the African-American tradition (Wilson Harris of Guyana and Toni Morrison of the United States), and one pair from the European-American tradition (Gabriel Garcia Marquez of Colombia and Walker Percy of the United States). Through a comparative analysis of the ethnic pairs of writers and the North American/South American sets of writers, the dissertation focuses on literature and spiritual integrity, myth and transculturation, and the degree of evolution and synthesis of the Amerindian myths already present in the New World upon its discovery by the Europeans in the fifteenth century and those myths brought to the New World by the European settlers and African slaves. Such a focus requires intensive study into general myth, as well as the myth systems of the Amerindians, the African slaves, and the European settlers. The method of study then turns to studying specific novels, utilizing four critical methods: Jungian, for its emphasis on mythic symbols and spiritual individuation; Bakhtin criticism, for its emphasis on the chronotope, the coming together of time and place, the axis where new worlds begin; Wolfgang Iser's reader response critical approach, for its emphasis on virtual dimension, the relationship between reader and writer that creates the text, which is similar to the relationship between gods and men that creates myth; and the functionalist approach that sees ritual as the enactment of myth. The significance of such a study lies in the demonstration of the endurance, presence, and necessity of myth, in the importance of showing that literature is one way of traveling towards religious, spiritual, and/or mythic truths, and in the contribution to a new emphasis of what "American" literature is in its broadest, transnational, and comparative (North-South) sense.