A Study Of Power Struggle In Leslie Silko’s Almanac Of The Dead From The Perspective Of Geographic Landscape

Leslie Marmon Silko is one of the representative writers in the field of Native American literature and the only female writer among the four greatest Native American masters.Silko won numerous awards including the National Endowment for the Arts Award and the Lifetime Achievement Award for Native American Writer.Silko’s Almanac of the Dead published in1991 has attracted extensive attention from scholars and critics both at home and abroad for its profound revelation and criticism of unequal socio-political power structure.Guided by landscape theory,this thesis explores the dynamics of power struggle embodied in the geographic landscape in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead.Silko regards the geographic landscape not as a static representation of geomorphologic features,but as a medium of power relations and a reflection of their dynamic changes.In Almanac of the Dead,Silko reveals the unfair socio-political power structure reified in the geographic landscape,which leads readers to deeply reflect on institutional corruption and social oppression.Besides introduction and conclusion,the body of this thesis consists of three chapters.Chapter one is a brief introduction to Leslie Marmon Silko,Almanac of the Dead,and the literature review on it at home and abroad.Chapter two deeply analyzes the struggle over gender power in the residential landscape,involving women’s resistance to male oppression and gender transgressors’ challenge to heterosexual hegemony.Chapter three focuses on the struggle over territory power embedded in the urban landscape.The sharp contrast between social elites’ greedy occupation of urban land and Vietnam veterans’ homelessness uncovers the unequal allocation of resources in the urban landscape.Chapter four mainly discusses the struggle over discourse power shown in the transnational landscape,including the subversion of the justice of official political discourse and the criticism on the falseness of hegemonic historical discourse.Chapter five is the conclusion,indicating the realistic significance of this thesis to the survival and development of the Native Americans and other marginalized social groups.This thesis aims to interpret the power struggle in Almanac of the Dead with landscape theory,and focuses on Silko’s deep concern for the realization of equal rights for the Native Americans and other oppressed people.Silko’s exploration of the unequal social power structure stimulates her readers’ deep thought about social injustice,deepens their understanding of the living situation of ethnic minorities and other oppressed and dispossessed people,and reflects Silko’s appeal for ethnic justice and equal coexistence of human beings.