Final Project Inspired by Sherman Alexie’s Toughest Indian in the World

Your final assignment is an analysis of one of Alexie's stories or an original short story exploring the themes and narrative strategies used by Alexie. You are exempt if you ran a discussion on a story and wrote on Grass Dancer.

Aim for 4-5 pages, STAPLE, type, and proofread.

Both essays and stories require a specific and creative title that deepens our understanding of your writing. Your title can include a metaphor, image, or theme.

Essays
Explore one of Alexie’s stories via a specific theme, or a focused contrast of a theme playing out in two or more of the stories. Probe further than we did in class, open philosophical questions, use quotes, be creative in your thought process and with your prose.

Suggested themes/lenses for analysis within one story. or contrasted in two or more:

*The construction of identity
*Resistance to oppression through humor
*Urban Indians straddling two worlds
*Connection and separation between characters
*Alexie's dark comic tone
* Alexie's affection for his characters
*Humor as a weapon
*Negotiating the past with the present
*The conscious decision to love (St. Junior)
*Trust and its nuances
*Alienation and grief
*The role of sexual encounters in the stories
*Cultural genocide or physical genocide and its resistance
*Seeking community
* The universal found in the cultural specific

Stories
Specific qualities of Sherman Alexie’s writing include allowing the specific (often Spokane Indian) to illuminate the universal. The revelation of character occurs through action, dialog, irony, humor, and in some cases small or large acts of subversive heroism. In The Toughest Indian in the World Alexie writes several kinds of stories: love stories, dreamscapes, and psychological realism, metaphoric and realistic, sardonic and, mostly, surprising combinations of all of these. In your short story, you should experiment with these approaches to character and techniques for storytelling. You story should be original and does not have to be about Indian characters. However, just like you experiment with components of Alexie’s writing style, you will also need to explore some of his themes, in your own original way.

For your theme, you can depict a character moving between two identities and cultures. This struggle can be depicted through relationships, events or the sexual politics. You can create a nightmare or dreamscape that comments on REAL things in society and culture (don’t go into sci-fi or fantasy), or a more realistic story with a unique and perspective. Many of the themes listed above are a good place to start.

Last Edited The Bolt on 6-Oct-2003 7:27 PM