Sherman Alexie
There is no denying the fact that Sherman Alexie is a writer of considerable fame. A number of his literary publications have been transferred into film, which is generally a more lucrative market than books. When a writer's work of fiction is made into a movie, it generally signifies that he or she has created something of significant cultural value -- the most valuable aspect of which is its ability to generate revenue or "sales and access" (Brill de amirez, 1999). In addition to Alexie's standing with contemporary popular culture, he is renowned as a writer as well. The author has published numerous short stories and novels, and won some important literary awards. He earned the 2010 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, as well as the 2007 National Book Award for Young People's Literature for his autobiography The Absolute True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, and won the Native Writer's…...

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References

Alexei, S. (2010). Breaking and entering. www.oprah.com. Retrieved from http://www.oprah.com/oprahsbookclub/PEN-Faulkner-Award-Winner-War-Dances-by-Sherman-Alexie/5

Alexei, S. (2003). What you pawn I will redeem. The New Yorker. Retrieved from  http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/04/21/030421fi_fiction 

Alexei, S. (No date). Alexei on the responsibilities of native writers. www.english.illinois.edu. Retrieved from  http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/a_f/alexie/general.htm 

Brill de Ramirez, S.B. (1999). Fancy dancer: A profile of Sherman Alexie." www.english.illinois.edu. Retrieved from

He believes he can regain some of it if he can buy the regalia, and when he does get the regalia, he dances into the street as if the spirit of his grandmother were within him.
Jackson is not the only example of what has happened to the Native population, for his friends are also alcoholics or delude themselves that their ship will return one day. Different tribes are represented, and it is implied that there are many Indians in Seattle, most on the local version of the Bowery, most drinking their lives away. Each of the friends Jackson meets on this day walks away and either dies or just disappears, but the impression left is that Jackson's world is getting smaller and smaller, leaving him more and more alone on the streets. There is something mystical about the regalia to him and also about the pawnshop where it is…...

Fighting the self in Sherman Alexie's "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven"
Sherman Alexie's short story "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven," relates the story of the narrator, an Indian who has left his reservation, who is adrift in the white world of Seattle. The narrator feels that everywhere he goes he is regarded like a threat -- even the 7-11. This leaves him in a constant state of anger, an anger that is intensified by alcoholism and a failing relationship with a white woman. Treated as someone who is prone to violence because of his race by a prejudiced society, the narrator eventually becomes violent, in a kind of unconscious self-fulfilling prophesy. He constantly fights with his white girlfriend. "In Seattle, I broke lamps. She and I would argue and I'd break a lamp, just pick it up and throw it down. At first, she'd buy…...

setting of Sherman Alexie's "hat you pawn I will redeem." The story is set amongst the community of homeless Native Americans in Seattle, ashington. The story juxtaposes images of the tribal past with images of Indians in modern times. I explore the question of how this contrast enables Jackson Jackson's redemption of grandmother's regalia to be symbolic of his people's redemption as well as his own redemption. My understanding of the story shifted as a result. Rather than focusing on how Jackson viewed his life alone, I also examined the life of the other Indians around him, many of whom like Jackson have struggled with addiction-related issues.
The hardest part of the essay was narrowing down a topic, given there is so much rich material that can be discussed in the story. Jackson has many relationships with both Indians and non-Indians. The strength of the essay is that it examines…...

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Works Cited

Alexie, Sherman. "What you pawn I will redeem." The New Yorker. 21 Apr 2013.

20 Apr 2014.

 http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/04/21/030421fi_fiction ?currentPage=all

Banned Sherman
The Problem of Sherman Alexie's True Diary

hile there are several good reasons for why Sherman Alexie's book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian should be read in schools, the honesty and lack of political correctness with which Alexie speaks about taboo subjects make it a good candidate for banning. The book is extremely provocative for any age, but in a politically correct age it is especially dangerous as it exposes youths to unconventional modes of thought and expression that challenge orthodox American values. In short, Alexie upsets the status quo that progressive thinkers, teachers, and leaders have spent more than a century protecting.

Alexie displays with absolute candor his take on how different races really perceive one another -- which in a nation that values equality is not the most sensitive way to discuss race. True, the novel exposes the reality of cultural identity and racism in America,…...

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Works Cited

Alexie, Sherman. The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. NY: Little, Brown

and Company, 2007. Print.

American, and what it means to be American. Two of the papers were written by Sherman Alexie. The third paper was written by Bharati Mukherjee, a Calcutta native who immigrated to the U.S. At the age of 21. The story of This is what it means to say Phoenix Arizona became the movie Smoke Signals that was made quite a few years later. The papers are narratives -- Bharati's is autobiographical and Alexie's have some autobiographical elements . The stories ask questions of belonging, in particular to a larger society that is quite different.
The stories are similar in terms of the ways that the different narrators and characters seek to find home. Bharati and her sister Mira are juxtaposed against each other in their quest to define home. They both have lived in the United States for decades, but they have different perspectives on the relationship that they wish…...

Sister Buried in a Trunk" by Aaron Barth-Martinson evokes the loneliness of death and the fear that the living must encounter when death strikes down one they love. That is the case in Barth-Martinson's poem, as the narrator calls for Emily and begs her to come down to walk with him rather than die alone in her room.
The blank verse poem makes allusions to two famous Emily's of literature: Faulkner's Emily in "A Rose for Emily," and Emily Dickinson, the famous hermit poet, who died virtually unknown, with all of her poems under her bed unpublished. The allusion to the first Emily is made by the last line, "I shed a tear for Emily," as the narrator cries for the recluse. Allusion to Dickinson is made in the lines referring to the poems found in the trunk: "I found a trunk full / Of slanted verse / And I…...

Frost, Hughes, Alexie
The Meaning of "Home" in Frost's "Hired Hand," Hughes' "Landlord" and Alexie's "I ill Redeem"

Robert Frost writes in "The Death of the Hired Hand," "Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in" (122-3). Implicit in these lines is the notion that "home" carries certain rules. "Home" is not just a place devoid of higher meaning, but an abstract idea -- a concept bound by a principle of belonging, of submitting, of caring. Just as Langston Hughes shows in "Ballad of the Landlord" (with the tension between negligent landlord and suffering tenant) or as Sherman Alexie shows in "hat You Pawn I ill Redeem" (Jackson sharing a portion of his winnings with Mary, whom he considers family -- "It's an Indian thing"), the principles of "home" are understood and upheld by those who realize its deeper meaning. This paper…...

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Works Cited

Alexie, Sherman. "What You Pawn I Will Redeem." The New Yorker. 12 Apr 2013.

Web.

Frost, Robert. "The Death of the Hired Man." Bartleby. 12 Apr 2013. Web.

Hughes, Langston. "Ballad of the Landlord." GIS.net. 12 Apr 2013. Web.

Othering in Alexie and the Classroom
Othering in Alexie and classroom

Otherness describes a relationship that is imposed by dominant groups with the power to define who is undesirable or lower-status. This a power relationship where the dominant members justify their own privilege even if the power group is the minority, with a classic example in South African Apartheid where a white minority kept the wealth, power and legal decision-making status for themselves even though they were far outnumbered. Othering by males against females provides a more balanced example where domination results in different pay for equal work; different social roles and different unpaid work expectations for example.

Most often however, stigmatization takes place by dominant groups against minorities where the dominant majority designates itself the norm, and then enacts values the minority group can never share. This allows the dominant group to assign others temporary privileges, but if the identifying stigma is…...

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Within their larger stigmatized group, the other Indians treat the two men in different ways. Victor was a member of the dominant group, those with some kind of income, but Thomas was stigmatized by the other Natives as 'crazy.' This forces Victor to overlook Thomas' status as "other" while he is necessary in resolving the unfinished business of collecting his father's remains. Thomas is really a member of another stigmatized group, "dusty" elders, by his telling of stories (Alexie, 1993, p. 65). Thomas' peers hate him because he had the courage to act toward his dream, but he also represents the traditional native culture through this tie to the elders, to Victor's father, and by his learning and inventing stories in the traditional style.

Thomas's obligation to look over Victor (Alexie, 1993, p. 70) also ties him with the traditional culture the elders are closer to. What this symbolizes is the stigma youth imposes on their elders once they are no longer of use to the newly dominant generation. Since the father's obligation to Thomas was that the young "take care of each other" (Alexie, 1993, p. 61), this is also a rejection of each other. But Thomas demands Victor pay attention to the traditional ways, if only once over the rest of his life. The modern generation represented by Victor feels ashamed to have lost their community (Alexie, 1993, p. 74) by throwing away what they see as useless, dusty old stories even though those are what gives Thomas the power to live out dreams Victor has never been able to achieve by his own choice (Alexie, 1993, p. 74).

This all provides the structure and language with which Alexie delivers his perspective on Othering, that marginalizing individuals by criteria that can never match those of the dominant, hegemonic culture who defines norms and bars these characters from ever being able to achieve privileged status, causes isolation, bullying and violence, crime and permanent suffering. In short, othering is deeply harmful for the entire society but particularly those who are disenfranchised. Alexie argues othering creates isolation from the dominant society through his father's death going unnoticed for many days until the smell of his rotting corpse gets too bad, but also within the Native culture where Thomas Builds-The-Fire is ostracized for his identification with traditional culture (above). Thomas experiences actual physical bullying, which is Alexie's fictional way of asserting that othering provokes real physical violence, even within peripheralized minority cultures. The young men who

Alexie, Victor, Thomas and Tonto
Alexie's experiences as a boy compare to those of Victor and Thomas each. It is as though Victor and Thomas are two alternate projections of Alexie's character: Victor represents the unhappy Indian, who is dissatisfied with the way his family and the people on the reservation conduct themselves (they drink too much); he wants to think of himself as a proud, warrior Indian. Thomas on the other hand is far more sympathetic to Victor's family and sees good points in Victor's dad. He also reminds Victor that their tribe was not a warrior tribe but rather a fishing people -- which is a humorous reminder because it completely takes the wind out of Victor's prideful sails and returns him for a moment back to earth. This is essentially the push and pull that Alexie identifies in his own self going to the movies to the see…...

Indian Education
Although sometimes it goes unrecognized, ethnicity or other superficial prejudices can help to determine an individual's role in a group or community. For example, in a community that is predominately white, those who are among this majority will often receive the most opportunities. Although this does not necessarily guarantee their success, those individuals in the majority will often have the first chance to fulfill the desirable roles. By contrast, individuals within the minority might commonly receive a mediocre education as well as more obstacles to have the same opportunities as other groups; sometimes these obstacles are virtually insurmountable. The feeling of unfairness and inequality can led many students who are disadvantaged to give up or drop out and their futures do not have the same probability for success. In the short story "Indian Education" by Sherman Alexie, the author tells a story in which the stereotypes that people acquire,…...

In the third chapter of Flight, Zits describes who is perhaps "the only real friend of [his] life" as a "pretty white boy" who "doesn't even like or respect Jesus -- or Allah or Buddha or LeBron James or any other God" (Alexie 24). In what is otherwise a very poignant passage, where Zits is explaining is near-instant love for this boy he meets in jail, the mention of LeBron James in the company of various prophets/deities is a not-so-subtle cynical undercut of what could be an intensely emotional scene. It is not further referenced, and this type of occurrence doesn't appear again in this passage, but there is a sense of slight self-mocking throughout due to remarks like these.
The self-mocking is anything but slight in Moore's "How to Become a riter." The speaker opens by telling you to try to be something else, and to fail at it…...

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Works Cited

Alexie, Sherman. Flight. New York: Grove Press, 2007.

Moore, Lorrie. "How to Become a Writer." In Self-Help. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 1995.

The scholarly heroine of the library set tale, entitled "The Search Engine," turns to books and literature, for the "huge number of books confirmed how much magic she'd been denied for most of her life, and now she hungrily wanted to read every book on every shelf. An impossible task, to be sure, Herculean in its exaggeration, but Corliss wanted to read herself to death," in a fashion that suggests this spinster has diverted her sexual desires into words and literature with a ferocious appetite. She feels ignored, so resolves not to allow books to go similarly ignored. "hat happens to the world when that many books go unread? And what happens to the unread authors of those unread books?" she wonders.
Frank Snake Church of "hat Ever Happened to Frank Snake Church," diverts his frustrated desires into basketball. Both Corliss and Church are incapable of expressing love, for a…...

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Works Cited

Alexie, Sherman. Ten Little Indians. New York: Grove Press, 2003.

This does not only apply in the case of someone interested in Native American culture, as it can also assist someone performing business with natives, concerning that the respective individual would know the attitudes that he needs to employ in order to make the partnership as effective as possible.
Lala Guerrero's song "No Chicanos on Tv" is meant to induce strong feelings in audiences as individuals acknowledge the fact that the contemporary society straightforwardly discriminates particular groups on account of their particularities. It is difficult to determine whether it is best to laugh or to cry when hearing the lyrics, as they are intense and sarcastic at the same time. When considering the humanities in general and their connection to this song, it appears that they are also directed at changing people's perception of certain communities. The song raises public awareness concerning the gravity associated with discriminating particular groups and…...

Individual Knowledge and Power
19th century poet Emily Dickinson is famous for her writing about the sometimes odd quality of being human, or rather the unnatural social norms that humanity has constructed. Dickinson claims that "[m]uch Sense -- the starkest Madness -- / 'Tis the Majority," meaning that most people guide their lives through typical principles of an objective common sense. Despite the best efforts of the philosophers and statesmen who have fostered Western principles of common sense throughout the centuries, people are not mathematical certainties; and while general rules are essential to the well-being of the population, individual lives cannot be dictated by a standardized social formula. True human growth and progress is a journey often taken alone, in which a person has to develop his or her own ideas of right and wrong. This short essay examines three different ways individual knowledge and power is originated, fostered, and remains…...