Last Lectures: Gerald Vizenor as Campus Novelist

The campus novel is, by now, an established part of Native literary tradition in America. Gerald Vizenor, however, remains the major Native exponent of the genre. This essay examines his 2001 novel Chancers, sketching out the ways in which it re-employs some of the standard tropes of the Anglo-American campus novel tradition (for instance caricature, “academic time” and murder). I argue that Vizenor uses the format of the campus novel, normally a vehicle for light comedy, to produce a rhizomatic effect that draws his academic reader into an unusual engagement with the text, one that reproduces the interaction between speaker and audience more normally associated with oral traditions.