A Study Of The Disaster Writing In Larose From The Perspective Of Disease Metaphor

Louise Erdrich is one of the most prolific,award-winning,and prestigious American Indian women writers in contemporary America,having received literary prizes such as the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction,the National Book Award,the O.Henry Prize for short fiction,and the Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction.La Rose,published by Erdrich in 2016,continues the discourse paradigm of anti-colonial writing,presenting the disastrous condition of the American Indian facing epidemics,war,and violence in the context of colonization.Taking the disease metaphor as a theoretical framework,this thesis argues that Erdrich,through disaster writing,presents the medical disaster,traumatic disaster and ethical disaster that American Indians confronted in the colonial context.Focusing on the epidemiological holocaust of the white colonists,garbage imperialism,and the subjugation of patriarchy that maimed the Native Americans in La Rose,Erdrich leverages the ideological forces embedded in American culture,providing historical and realistic thinking and enlightening significance for the existential condition and post-disaster reconstruction of American Indians.This thesis is comprised of five chapters.Chapter One briefly introduces Louise Erdrich and her novel La Rose,then sorts out the research status of Erdrich’s works by domestic and foreign scholars,and then outlines the theoretical framework and the main viewpoints of this thesis.Chapter Two,by the metaphor of tuberculosis,illuminates the epidemiological holocaust inflicted upon American Indians by white colonists,culminating in the eclipse of indigenous therapeutics and the extinction of indigenous heritage.In the third chapter,this study probes into the traumatic disaster signified by the metaphor of disability and elaborates on the physical deformity and fragmented identity that war and colonialism brought to American Indians.The fourth chapter contains,with the thematic concern of ethical disaster,the subversion of Native “feminine cosmogony” by colonialism with patriarchy as its core,representing the catastrophic picture of the ethical disorder of American Indian society,as well as the dislocation of American Indian women’s ethical identity.Chapter Five is the conclusion of this thesis,summing up the main points in each chapter and pointing out the practical significance of disaster writing.In brief,this thesis aims to interpret Erdrich’s disaster writing in La Rose by the utilization of disease metaphor,dissecting Erdrich’s profound questions about the colonial discourse,her resentment against the injustice of the white colonists,and her contemplation of the collapse of Native “feminine cosmogony”.The writer’s political wisdom,historical consciousness and literary thinking are displayed in the intricate juxtaposition of history and modernity.