Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Barbara L. Pittman

Critical Essay by Barbara L. Pittman

SOURCE: Pittman, Barbara L. “Cross-Cultural Reading and Generic Transformations: The Chronotope of the Road in Erdrich's Love Medicine.” American Literature 67, no. 4 (December 1995): 777-92.

In the following essay, Pittman explores how Erdrich uses time and space to create a narrative world in Love Medicine, noting that “[discovering the literary and cultural features essential to a creative understanding of Louise Erdrich's Love Medicine means recognizing the literary and cultural chronotopes present in the work.”]

Writing from within two literary traditions, as all Native American writers do, Louise Erdrich writes both traditions into her work.¹ As a mixed-blood of German-American and Chippewa descent, she seems to embody the mediation that David Murray says is necessary in cross-cultural reading to “reduce the danger of making the space between the two sides into an unbridgeable chasm, or of turning differences into Otherness.”² Euro-Americans reading Native American literature face the particular challenge of...
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