R and I were talking about Louise Erdrich, one of my literary heroes, and her character Fleur Pillager. R raised the issue of self-exotification, a problem I had been thinking about specifically with respect to Erdrich's work ever since I finished reading Four Souls and moved on to Tracks . N and I had talked about the voyeuristic relationship of the reader to the text, something that is not necessarily exoticist but it's certainly a trope that encourages exoticism, I think. We also talked about how the stories Erdrich relates are not living stories - they are often of the past, and thus it is easy to remove one's responsibility and relation to the text. In any case, I feel that the intimacy of the stories penned by Erdrich are a result of her own upbringing as a writer and as a person, and I don't want her to write differently, but I have to acknowledge this trap of self-exotification... I guess my argument though with that assessment is that Erdrich doesn't just p...
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