Individual Memory And Reconstruction Of Micro-history

The Master Butchers Singing Club is one of the famous contemporary American writer Louise Erdrich’s masterpieces. This thesis mainly focuses on two issues in The Master Butchers Singing Club from the perspective of New Historicism:one is the writer Louise Erdrich’s historical consciousness; the other is the relationship between history and literary text. Firstly, the thesis investigates how Erdrich’s historical consciousness which has been buried deeply under the text manifests itself through her construction of main characters’ individual memory in the creation of the novel. Then it analyzes how Erdrich manages to bring the micro-history of an ordinary German-American family and the ethnic history of Native Americans which have been repressed by the grand narrative of history to the surface by employing a series of strategies of historiography, thus to achieve the purpose of reconstructing micro-histories.The main body of the thesis consists of three chapters. The first chapter is divided into two parts. One is the literature review of the previous researches on the novel, which lays the foundation for the thesis and points out its feasibility; the other is the theoretical basis of the thesis in which New Historicism and its crucial tenets like the relationship among writer, literary text and social context, textuality of history and historicity of text, and micro-history’s deconstruction of grand narrative are discussed for the analysis of the thesis.Chapter two mainly analyzes that Erdrich constructs an equal dialogue between literary text and history by recalling characters’individual memories, representing the family history of ordinary people and the ethnic history of the marginalized people. The novel penetrates the family history of ordinary people to expose the absurdity and cruelty of wars and outlines the denounced and repressed ethnic history of Native Americans from the marginalized individuals’voiceless recounts, thus refuting grand narrative and revealing the alternative historical truths of war and violence.The third chapter contributes to the analysis of Erdrich’s strategies of historiography. Erdrich strategically justifies the articulation of micro-histories by questioning the legitimacy of grand narrative with the marginalized people’s silent resistance, reflecting the ruptures of official linear history with the nonlinear narratives of micro-history and deconstructing the political authority of grand narrative with the trickster’s subversive discourse, thus to achieve the purpose of reconstructing the micro-histories of ethnic minorities like Euro-Americans and Native Americans.