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The latest novel written by Erdrich, The Round House, wins the the American National Book Award in 2012. In this book, Erdrich changes the multiple narrative perspectives, which is the way she used to adopt in previous novels, into the single perspective of a 13-year-old Indian-American boy Joe. Joe turns to the law system and religion for help but fails, so he, together with his three friends, follows the traditional “Wiindigoo Law” to identify the crime and punishes Linden accordingly. By using a relatively political tone and emphasizing the historical legal difficulties that the Chippewa faces causing by laws and regulations formulated by the U.S. government.
Louise Erdrich and her numerous works catches the attention of lots of scholars and critics. In the United States, studies on her works, which are influenced by the research on Native American Literature, cover aspects like feminism, narratology, ecologism, genealogy, Ojibwe culture and so on, representing the level of the research in this field. Most research findings, including journal articles, master's theses, doctoral dissertations and few monographs, focus on Erdrich’s previous works like Love Medicine (1984) and Tracks (1988). The study covers following aspects:
Erdrich has always taken the cultural relics of Ojibwe as precious spiritual resources and inspiration for writing. She pays great attention to the transmission of Ojibwe culture in her stories by describing the natural scene that she is familiar with and people living on the reservation (Wen, 2013). Scholars also start to study the connections and differences between different tribes as they understands more about Ojibwe.
The discussion on feminism based on the female characters in Erdrich’s works is also featured with Indian tradition because it is not comprehensive to read those obedient, tolerant and humorous women only from a regular feminism point of view. Shaddock said that women are more forced by the domestic culture than any other groups (Shaddock, 1994). The analysis of female characters should be conducted in the tribal cultural background.
This part concentrates on special narration skills. Erdrich creates fast-paced novels (Ma, 2014), and she is be adept in adopting the oral narration history to describe from multiple narrative perspective the life changes of Indians under the white government (Chen, 2008). There are some new words to name her specific genres like “novels-in-stories” (Cox, 1998, p. 151) and “short story sequence” (Stookey, 1999, p. 32).
Studies also focuses on ecologism. Erdrich always feels a strong involvement with the earth. Peter G. Beidler says that the pessimism cry of Erdrich for the earth makes it even more desolate (Beidler, 2002). Since her novels share the same background, scholars usually combine some works to study the same theme. Joni Adamson mentions in American Indian Literature, Environmental Justice, and ecocriticism that he associates his study with the teaching experience of Indian literature and comprehension of reading Tracks.
Most of Erdrich’s novel are set in north Dakota, which makes characters and clans appears in different stories as leading of supporting roles. Studies in genealogy try to figure out the relations between roles and clans, making plot analysis more convenient.
Domestic research develops relatively later. Few monographs and some theses and journal articles are published in this field like The American Indian Literature in a postcolonial context——on Louise Erdrich’s Tracks (Wang, 2006). The study also develops into various perspectives and combines two or more perspectives to better analyze her works.
Semioethics is a new conception introduced and developed by Augusto Ponzio and Susan Petrilli (Zhou, 2012). It indicates the study of the relation between signs and values or meanings and significance (Petrilli & Ponzio, 2012) and implies the human requirement for critique like the evaluation of connections, implications, and involvement without self-interest. The emotions, values and requirements of every inpidual, no matter good or evil, are the object of semioethical study (Zhang, 2013). Since there are quite a lot unique symbols in Indian culture, but the study in this area is rare to see, which makes this paper creative to some extent. This paper will follow the three major approaches——law, religion and tradition——through which Joe tries to pursue justice and analyze the symbolic meaning of “round house”.