Alexie, Sherman | Carrie Etter (essay date 2001)
Carrie Etter (essay date 2001)
SOURCE: Etter, Carrie. “Dialectic to Dialogic: Negotiating Bicultural Heritage in Sherman Alexie's Sonnets.” In Telling the Stories: Essays on American Indian Literatures and Cultures, edited by Elizabeth Hoffman Nelson and Malcolm A. Nelson, pp. 143-51. New York, N.Y.: Peter Lang Publishing, 2001.
[In the following essay, Etter discusses Alexie's modification of the traditional English sonnet, asserting that this particular structure supports the author's literary treatment of tensions between Native American and Anglo-American cultures.]
As James Clifford notes in The Predicament of Culture, cultural contact has consistently been portrayed as either “absorption by the other or resistance to the other,” a dichotomizing event (344). However, is it ever so absolute? What do we make of Sherman Alexie's sonnets? Because they lack rhyme and meter, hence avoiding the strictures of Western...
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