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Alice Walker |
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As with the controversy over The Color Purple, much of the attention paid to Walker's work has focused upon the HISTORICAL and/or SOCIOLOGICAL validity of her thematic premises as they are expressed in the actions and situations she describes. The highly personalized nature of much of this commentary also clearly invokes the category of READER-RESPONSE criticism.
Walker herself has made clear that her larger purposes involve the preservation of traditions, including family history, not otherwise recorded. One can see from this comment the potential fruitfulness of both a BIOGRAPHICAL and a MYTHOLOGICAL approach to her work, especially her poetry and fiction. And of course, given its subject matter and intentions, her work demands (the most precise term possible here) to be considered in the context of GENDER studies.
One might best approach "Everyday Use" through a combination of these various odes, as well as the FORMAL (since it is, after all, a short story, and thus an artistic construct), with attention to such key elements of the story as: its setting in time and place; the historical background out of which the lives and values of the characters arise; the personality and the assumptions of the story's narrator as expressed through her style; and the larger importance of the characters's names, both those originally given them and those they give themselves, as well as other descriptive terms applied to them.
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