GERALD VIZENOR

Gerald Vizenor, the most prolific Native American writer of this century, has produced more than twenty-five books in genres as varied as fiction, journalism, haiku, and literary theory. The first book-length study devoted to this important author, Gerald Vizenor: Writing in the Oral Tradition lays the groundwork essential for understanding his complex work. Kimberly M. Blaeser begins with an examination of Vizenors concept of Native American oral culture and his unique incorporation of oral tradition in the written word. She then explicates Vizenors method of linking the traditional oral aesthetic with reader-response theories and details Vizenors efforts to produce a form of writing that resists static meaning, involves the writer in the creation of the literary moment, and invites political action. She also explores the place of Vizenors work within the larger contexts of contemporary tribal literature, Native American scholarship, and critical theory. Individual chapters examine Vizenors renditions of the Native American trickster figure in his fiction; analyze his employment of a network of critical, social, and literary subtexts within the larger text; and explain the sometimes difficult Vizenorese, a complex of terms that characterize people and ideas. Blaeser offers explanations of the origins, meanings, and dialogic purposes of a variety of terms, such as manifest manners, dead voices, word cinemas, terminal creeds, and socioacupuncture. Blaesers is the first study to reveal the full importance of haiku in Vizenors work. His poetry, which draws equally from Zen aesthetics and Ojibway dream songs, contains concise, economical descriptions, made up equally of absence and presence-a style characterictic of Vizenors writing in other genres as well. Based upon scholarship, close reading, and interviews with Vizenor himself, and written by a Native scholar of Vizenors own tribe, this book explicates Vizenors ideas, methods, and forms, making even his most sophisticated arguments accessible to the general reader. Kimberly M. Blaeser, an enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe, is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. She is the author of Trailing You, a prize-winning collection of poetry.