Lecture 5: Louise Erdrich's Justice Trilogy | Margaret Kearney

Louise Erdrich is a contemporary American novelist and poet, an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians with German and French ancestry. She is often compared to William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez because of her lyrical prose, interweaving storylines, and the richly imagined fictional region in which many of novels are set. At the same time, Erdrich is one of the most significant writers of the second wave of the Native American Renaissance, which began in the late 1960s and 70s with figures such as N. Scott Momaday, James Welch, Leslie Marmon Silko. Erdrich’s first novel, Love Medicine, won the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award; since then, she has published 19 novels and won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, among other honors.
Erdrich’s work explores the losses and violence that Indigenous communities have suffered in the US. Three novels in particular-The Plague of Doves, The Round House, and LaRose-are known as the “justice trilogy” because of their explicit focus on the ways that individuals and communities respond to harm, whether through legal precedents or acts of retribution, reparation, or reconciliation. The three novels display the narrative complexity that characterizes much of Erdrich’s fiction, featuring a profusion of storylines and subplots and/or multiple narrators.
In this lecture, Margaret Kearney (Yale Divinity School) introduces Louise Erdrich in the context of her modernist/postmodernist literary influences as well as the Native American literary tradition to which her work belongs. After providing a brief introduction to the justice trilogy and its connecting themes, Margaret closely reads three passages, one from The Round House, one from The Plague of Doves, and one from LaRose, analyzing Erdrich’s literary techniques and the way her novels dramatize complex questions of justice and reparation without providing easy resolution or synthesis.

[@maryforster1417]

Wow! A wonderful lecture! I wish I could be lectured by you all day everyday! Thank you!

[@rodrigocortesm.]

Amazing. Thank you!