Angela Carter'in Nights at the Circus ve Sherman Alexie'nin The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven ile Reservation Blues adlı eserlerinde düzenbaz söylemin yıkıcı işlevleri

This dissertation serves to examine one novel by the English writer Angela Carter and a collection of short stories and a novel by the Native American writer Sherman Alexie with regard to trickster discourse, these texts being Carter's Nights at the Circus (1984), and Alexie's The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven (1993) and Reservation Blues (1995). The study attempts to trace the presence of contradictory, paradoxical and peripheral figures of tricksters and trickster-like liminal figures in the selected texts in order to divulge how the dominant patriarchal and colonial discourses in Carter's and Alexie's texts are challenged and undermined, and how Foucauldian reverse discourses are created from within through the subversive means of trickster discourse. The study aims to make a comparative analysis of the trickster figures in the selected texts and identify their similar as well as different characteristics, roles and functions within two quite different cultures. By analysing sample narratives that use trickster figures (as defined in the thesis) from two distant cultures, this study identifies twentieth-century tricksters in English and North American Native literature as cross-cultural and cross-gendered figures who, authorized to engage in transgressive acts with immunity due to their outcast status, serve to subvert the dominant discourses on behalf of disenfranchised factions.