"A Great Telling:" Audience as Co-Creator of Story
| dc.contributor.advisor | Martin, Ann | |
| dc.contributor.advisor | Hunnef, Jenna | |
| dc.contributor.committeeMember | Banco, Lindsey | |
| dc.contributor.committeeMember | Thompson, Deneh'Cho | |
| dc.contributor.committeeMember | Bidwell, Kristina | |
| dc.creator | Ennis, Caragana | |
| dc.creator.orcid | 0000-0002-2258-8103 | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2022-09-23T19:27:50Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2022-09-23T19:27:50Z | |
| dc.date.copyright | 2022 | |
| dc.date.created | 2022-11 | |
| dc.date.issued | 2022-09-23 | |
| dc.date.submitted | November 2022 | |
| dc.date.updated | 2022-09-23T19:27:51Z | |
| dc.description.abstract | This thesis analyzes theories and enactments of story-reception in Indigenous texts. I consider the audience or reader of stories to possess an influential power that constantly functions in their interactions with storytellers and texts. Despite the constant presence of the story-receiver in acts of story-creation and story-exchange, their influence is not typically perceived, especially in narrative forms that include some material and/or temporal distance between the storyteller and their audience or reader. The lack of awareness of this network of creative influence surrounding a given story suggests an often-missed opportunity for audience members and readers to consider their own inherent roles as collaborators and to enact this collaboration intentionally. I focus on contemporary performance-based texts by Indigenous authors from Turtle Island that actively treat the audience or reader as co-collaborators and foreground this treatment in the structures of their texts, thus making the influence of the story-receiver visibly present. I analyze Cliff Cardinal’s huff and Layli Long Soldier’s Whereas in order to find traces of the influence of the story-receiver by identifying the methods by which Cardinal and Long Soldier draw attention to and engage with this influence. Cardinal uses extreme and interruptive audience participation in order to draw the audience’s attention to their own presence as well as their own role in relationship with Cardinal. Long Soldier textually signals the presence of the reader through spatial dynamics on the page, and through her treatment of borrowed congressional language demonstrates the possibility of transforming harmful texts through relational engagement. I conclude that there is a need for a methodological shift in how the role of the story-receiver is treated in literary scholarship, which holds potential for conscious engagement in reading and viewing practices that may typically be enacted unconsciously in order to access a deeper register of textual relationship with a vast network of collaborators in story-creation. | |
| dc.format.mimetype | application/pdf | |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/10388/14214 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | |
| dc.subject | English Literature | |
| dc.subject | Indigenous Literatures | |
| dc.title | "A Great Telling:" Audience as Co-Creator of Story | |
| dc.type | Thesis | |
| dc.type.material | text | |
| thesis.degree.department | English | |
| thesis.degree.discipline | English | |
| thesis.degree.grantor | University of Saskatchewan | |
| thesis.degree.level | Masters | |
| thesis.degree.name | Master of Arts (M.A.) |