Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Alexie, Sherman (Vol. 154) - Denise Low (review date winter 1996)

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Denise Low (review date winter 1996)

SOURCE: Low, Denise. Review of The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, by Sherman Alexie. American Indian Quarterly 20, no. 1 (winter 1996): 123–25.

[In the following review, Low examines Alexie's short story collection The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven in relation to postmodernist theory.]

Peter Burger, in Theory of the Avant-Garde, notes that artistic works reflect the time and place, or history, of their cultures, “the unfolding of object and the elaboration of categories are connected” (p. 16). Sherman Alexie's short stories in The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven could not have been written during any other period of history. The twenty-two short tales read like a casebook of postmodernist theory—beyond surrealism and absurdity, and certainly beyond classicism. Irony, pastiche, and mingling of popular cultures occur throughout the...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Leslie Ullman (review date summer 1993)
   2. Verlyn Klinkenborg (review date 18 June 1995)
   3. Denise Low (review date winter 1996)
   4. Jennifer Gillan (essay date March 1996)
   5. Lee Lemon (review date Spring 1996)
   6. Howard Meredith (review date Spring 1996)
   7. Sherman Alexie and Doug Marx (interview date 16 September 1996)
   8. Madison Smart Bell (review date 17 November 1996)
   9. Sherman Alexie and Erik Himmelsbach (interview date 17 December 1996)
   10. Judith Bolton-Fasman (review date 6 January 1997)
   11. Robert L. Berner (review date spring 1997)
   12. Peter Donahue (essay date Spring 1997)
   13. Ron McFarland (essay date Spring 1997)
   14. Sherman Alexie and John Purdy (interview date 4 October 1997)
   15. Michael Gorra (review date 5 March 1998)
   16. Sherman Alexie and Dennis West and Joan M. West (interview date fall 1998)
   17. Dan Georgakas (review date fall 1998)
   18. Jonathan Levi (review date 18 June 2000)
   19. Jonathan Penner (review date 9 July 2000)
   20. Joyce Carol Oates (review date 20 July 2000)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright

1. Sherman Alexie