Reading between Worlds
Narrativity in the Fiction of Louise Erdrich
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 3328916 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Catherine Rainwater (0000-0001-8290-8984, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1990 |
| Volume | 62 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 405 |
| Publication date | 1990-09-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | American Literature (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0002-9831 • E-ISSN: 1527-2117 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/2926739 |
| OpenAlex | W2333306282 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
LOUISE Erdrich is a contemporary writer of German-American and Chippewa heritage. Like many literary works by Native Americans, her novels, Love Medicine (I984), The Beet Queen (I986), and Tracks (I988), reflect the ambivalence and tension marking the lives of people, much like herself, from dual cultural backgrounds. Erdrich's novels feature Native Americans, mixed-bloods, and other culturally and socially displaced characters whose marginal status is simultaneously an advantage and a disadvantage, a source of both power and powerlessness.! In Love Medicine, for example, Lipsha Morrissey, born with the shaman's healing touch, grows up with both Native American and Roman Catholic religious beliefs. His knowledge of both religions is sometimes an advantage, but at other times he is merely paralyzed between contradictory systems of belief. In The Beet Queen, Wallace Pfef, marginal as a homosexual in a small Midwestern town, plays an ambivalent role as Karl Adair's lover and as husband-and-father substitute to Karl's wife and daughter. His liminal status is a source of both happiness and grief. In Tracks, Erdrich's two narrators likewise struggle with liminality in their efforts to leave behind early lives in favor of others they have chosen. Nanapush grows up Christian in a Jesuit school, but later chooses life in the woods and Chippewa tradition; the other narrator, Pauline, is a mixed-blood raised in the Native American tradition, but she wishes to be white and
Art · Linguistics · Literature · Narrative · Narrativity · Reading (process · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · History · Philosophy
| Unique citing works | 5 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,18 |
| Citation span | 1998 - 2011 (14) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 4 |