approximately 900 words ). H u m a n i t i e s

Based on your reading of Louise Erdrich’s The Round House, choose one of the following questions to respond to. Make sure to provide actual citations of the text. Make sure to structure your analysis according to the defense of a thesis statement, and to put your thesis statement in boldface type. Be sure to include a cover letter where you tell me anything you would like about your writing process, and to include a references page. Your analysis should be no less than 2 pages (approximately 600 words) and no more than 3 pages (approximately 900 words). While you are not required to do so, you are welcome to engage the other required texts from our course this semester: Glover’s Humanity and Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz.

Louise Erdrich The Round House:

1. Sexual and gender violence is a women’s issue, a men’s issue, a family issue, a community issue. Erdrich makes this point by selecting Joe, the victim’s son, as a narrator for the story. Through his voice, we learn the devastating impact of the assault on his family and the years spent reconciling what happened and trying to figure out how to tell his story. Explain in detail some important aspect of what Joe learns about sexual and gender violence by telling his story. What did you learn?
2. The novel refuses to provide readers any neat resolution to its conflicts and their larger implications. Why is this? What narrative work does this refusal perform within the contexts of gender, jurisdiction, justice and settler sexual assault which organize the text? What might this suggest as the novel’s “takeaway” for readers? What actions, emotions, and attitudes does it provoke?
3. Towards the novel’s climax, Father Travis tells Joe, “in order to purify yourself, you have to understand yourself. Everything out in the world is also in you. Good, bad, evil, perfection, death, everything. So we study our souls.” Would you say this is a good characterization of humanity? How is each of these things visible in Joe’s personality?
4. When Joe makes his fateful decision concerning his mother’s attacker, he says it is about justice, not vengeance. What do you think? How does that decision change him? Why doesn’t he share the information he has with the people who love him?