By Christopher B. Teuton
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Additional info for Deep Waters: The Textual Continuum in American Indian Literature
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Derrida’s work reveals “that even when a text tries to privilege speech as immediacy, it cannot completely eliminate the fact that speech, like writing, is based on a différance (a Derridean neologism meaning both ‘deferment’ the oral, graphic, and critical impulses | 25 and ‘difference’) between signifier and signified inherent in the sign” (Johnson 1995, 43). Derrida’s critique of logocentrism is persuasive. When we shift our attention to Native America, however, a more powerful influence is exerted by the concept of graphocentrism.
According to oral-literate theory, primarily oral societies, those without writing as recorded speech, have different cognitive capacities and social organizations. The codification of oral societal characteristics is stated most succinctly (and controversially) by Walter S. Ong in Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (1982). Ong argues that individuals in oral societies (which are small, communal, and depend on face-to-face interaction) think in particular, performative ways. He lists nine characteristics of the “oral mind” in primary oral cultures (those without any knowledge of writing): formulaic, redundant, conservative, agonistic, aggregative, close to the human lifeworld, situational, participatory, and homeostatic (36–57).
Drawing on ethnographic theories of performance and translation, and on the oral poetics of scholars such as Dell Hymes and Dennis Tedlock, critics of Native American literature have made sophisticated thematic readings of the oral dimensions of Indigenous texts a cornerstone of our field. Critics such as A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff, Andrew Wiget, Kenneth Lincoln, Larry Evers, Paula Gunn Allen, Brian Swann, Arnold Krupat, Kenneth M. Roemer, Greg Sarris, and Simon J. Ortiz, among many others, recognize that Native American written literature carries on Indigenous oral storytelling traditions.