Transitional Narratives and Cultural Continuity

Abstract

Fiction that emerges from the immediate and consciously negotiated experience of radical cultural change constitutes a category of world literature with exemplary pragmatic value for contemporary criticism. American Indian writing provides some notable examples of transitional texts, in which the act of writing is simultaneously a development of an imaginative tradition and an attempted entry into a new cultural order without known precedent and beyond any anticipation implied by the cultural past. Such writing lets us glimpse the challenge of the unimaginable as it provokes experiments with form and content in order to increase the range of a society's imaginative resources. Of course, these general assertions have value only in relation to specific texts. One largely unpublished body of writing that promises to be a significant stimulus to thoughtful analysis of transitional texts when it is finally published was written by George Sword, an Oglala Sioux political leader, tribal court judge, and spiritual leader, who was born in 1846 and died in