英文摘要 |
Taking oral storytelling as a creative form with distinctive socio-cultural significances, this paper presents a comparative study of storytelling in both Western and Native North American cultural traditions, and then elucidates the cultural poetics of storytelling in the acclaimed Native American film "Smoke Signals", written and co-produced by Sherman Alexie. This paper first gives a general account of the fall and the revival of storytelling, and a feature study of storytelling as a communal experience theorized in Walter Benjamin's essay "The Storyteller." The next part probes storytelling in Native North American oral traditions, studying its forms, performativity, cultural functions, and spiritual implications. This study complements the view of critics like Benjamin and Bakhtin that storytelling as a participatory communal experience is dead in Western society. The final sections present storytelling as a filmic feat of renovation in "Smoke Signals", in which Thomas Builds-the-Fire is cast as, not only ironically a babbling nuisance, but also positively a tribal storyteller. In this way, the paper elucidates how Native cultural poetics functions in a Native filmic production. |