Presentation Topic: First Nations (USA) perspectives: by and about

ABSTRACT:

Leslie Marmon Silko's Storyteller Challenges the idea of book as a Euro-American category. An awkwardly bound compilation of photographs, mythology, gossip, short stories, and poetry, Storyteller enhances the uses of form to convey the dynamics of oral storytelling. The appearance of the book itself, with its elongated page-width, shorter page length, and photographs, invites the interpretation that one is looking at a scrapbook or family album. In spite of what seems on surface a hodge-podge of genres and themes storyteller weaves itself into a spiderweb that brings together time, land, and experience and captures the essence of life and language in a way that diverse audience can appreciate. The book contains 25 poems, 26 black and white photographs from Silko's extended Laguna family. The paper will be an effort to show how these written and visual art forms have been used by the writer to create strands of spiderwebs. How the writer has used line breaks, spacing and white space to help convey the rhythm of oral storytelling will also be examined.

BIONOTE:

I am working as senior lecturer at Kurukshetra University, India. I worked with Prof. Duane Champagne, Greg Sarris and Kenneth Lincoln at American Indian Studies Center University of California Los Angeles as a Senior Fulbright Fellow during 1999-2000.I have reviewed some journal articles and novels for American Indian Culture and Research Journal, UCLA. My area of interest is alternative narratives of Native America.