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    A Study Guide for Louise Erdrich's "The Leap"
    A Study Guide for Louise Erdrich's "The Leap"
    A Study Guide for Louise Erdrich's "The Leap"
    Ebook35 pages24 minutes

    A Study Guide for Louise Erdrich's "The Leap"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Louise Erdrich's "The Leap," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateJul 15, 2016
    ISBN9781535837880
    A Study Guide for Louise Erdrich's "The Leap"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Louise Erdrich's "The Leap" - Gale

      10

      The Leap

      Louise Erdrich

      1990

      Introduction

      Originally published in the March 1990 issue of Harper's magazine and anthologized numerous times since, Louise Erdrich's short story The Leap was also included in the 2009 short-story collection The Red Convertible: Selected and New Stories, 1978-2008. As is true of all Erdrich's writing, this particular piece achieves momentum because of the author's rich characterization and descriptive pathos.

      Although Erdrich dislikes the notion that she is a magical realist, or a writer who infuses the improbable into otherwise realistic stories, she does indeed seem to do just that. It is a technique that serves her well in The Leap, a recalled memory of a mother by a daughter. Familiar Erdrich themes of familial love and the consequence of choice are covered here as the narrator recalls how her own life has been shaped and influenced by her elderly mother's choices.

      Although The Leap has never been pointedly praised as outstanding or particularly influential, it is one of many short stories written by Erdrich that, when considered as a whole, provide an insightful, multicultural, and entertaining perspective on everyday life. Unlike most of her characters, those found in this story are not specifically identified as Native American, though they could be. The reader never learns the ethnicity of the narrator or her parents. In removing that label, Erdrich has made her story more universally appealing because it brings with it no cultural assumptions or inferences.

      Author Biography

      Karen Louise Erdrich (pronounced AIR-drik), who writes as Louise Erdrich, was born on July 7, 1954, in Little Falls, Minnesota, the oldest of seven children. Her father, Ralph, was of German heritage, and her mother, Rita, was of Ojibwe descent. Both taught at a boarding school on one of the local Indian reservations.

      Erdrich enrolled in Dartmouth College in New Hampshire in 1972. That same year, she met her future husband, Michael Dorris, chair of the newly created Native American Studies Department. Drawing on her rich and pervasive Ojibwe

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