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Acknowledgments I am grateful to St. Edward's University in Austin, Texas, for granting me sabbatical leave in the spring of 1997 to complete this study, as well as for supporting travel to numerous conferences, where I benefited from presenting portions of this work at meetings of the Northeastern Modern Language Association, April 4, 1997, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; the Southern Chapter of the Modern Language Association, November 1, 1996, in San Antonio, Texas; the American Literature Association, May 27, 1995, in Baltimore, Maryland, and October 1, 1993, in San Antonio, Texas; and the Semiotic Society of America, October 25, 1991, in College Park, Maryland. Also encouraging in the earliest stage of my project were being invited to speak on Louise Erdrich in the Fall Humanities Series at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, November 15, 1989, in Baltimore, Maryland, and receiving the Norman Foerster Prize in 1990 from the Modern Language Association for my article (cited in the next paragraph) on Erdrich in AmericanLiterature. Brief portions of this study have appeared in different form in the following publications: "Reading between Worlds: Narrativity in the Fiction of Louise Erdrich," AmericanLiterature 62 (September 1990): 405-22; "The Semiotics of Dwelling in Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony," AmericanJournal of Semiotics 9 (1992): 219-40; and "Planes, Lines, Shapes, and Shadows: N. Scott Momaday's Iconological Imagination," Texas Studies in Literature and Language 37 (Winter 1995): 376-93. Special appreciation goes to William J. Scheick (J. R. Millikan Centennial Professor of Literature, Universityof Texas at Austin), always mybest critic, loyal supporter, and truest friend. Andfinally, I would like to thank Jerome E. Singerman, Humanities Editor at the Universityof Pennsylvania Press, for his gracious assistance with my project. 222 Acknowledgments ...

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