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Understanding Sherman Alexie (Understanding Contemporary American Literature)
Understanding Sherman Alexie - Understanding Contemporary American Literature Author:Daniel Grassian In this first book-length examination of Native American poet, novelist, filmmaker, and short story writer Sherman Alexie, Daniel Grassian offers a comprehensive look at a writer immersed in traditional Native American, as well as mainstream American, culture. Grassian takes readers through Alexies career, from his first collections of poe... more »try, The Business of Fancydancing and Old Shirts and New Skins, through such novels as Reservation Blues and Indian Killer, to the recent short story collection Ten Little Indians. Grassian suggests that Alexies oeuvre reflects his primary artistic challenge: how to write about Indians in a predominantly televisual country that distorts and complicates the importance and nature of ethnicity itself. Drawing comparisons with such established Native American writers as N. Scott Momaday and James Welch as well as with Generation X peers, Grassian presents Alexies work as equally informed by Native American culture and generic, mainstream influences. He demonstrates how Alexie utilizes popular culture and connects it to the lives of Native Americans as his art transforms the conventional tools of cultural colonization into a means of Native American empowerment. Grassian explores Alexies ability to counteract lingering stereotypes of Native Americans, his challenges to the dominant American history, and his suspicion of the New Age movement. The picture of Alexie that emerges from Grassians text is one of a writer who is fiercely talented, intelligent, witty, and honest, a writer committed to helping readers understand contemporary Native American lives, even if his work sometimes portrays both Native Americans and non-Natives in an unfavorable light.« less