i thought you all had died out there.  sorry to everyone for my no-show at the
meeting last week -- audrey was out of school and i needed to see to her.
 
i am working on some pretty interesting sstuff for the reading as
membership/exclusion and the borders nodes, i'd be happy to share when i get
together enough to have some of this in my computer -- right now it's mostly
notes on scraps of paper and in my head.  briefly (unless i do a combo class
with Andrea Beck on Holocausts, and even then some of it will fly) i'm working
with Leslie Silko's _Ceremony_, Mary Crow Dog's _Lakota Woman_ (the book and
the movie, poetry from Joy Harjo (_In Mad Love and War_) and Wendy Rose (_Going
to War With All My Relations_), short stories from _Talking Leaves_, and maybe
some sections from Sarah Winnemucca's _Life Among the Piutes_. In case it's not
obvius, i want to look at how power can be constructed by "other" readers
through a shift in their positions AS readers, through a consciousness of the
world as text and themselves as "manipulators" of "interpretations" of texts
outside themselves as well as the way they are read as texts.
i feel pretty secure within these two nodes, but i'll be looking for help from
you all on the getting started stuff -- i've never been especially great at
that. there is some pedagogy on "reading" in the last chapter of my thesis,
some exercises i use to teach "other" texts, if you're interested, i'd be happy
to copy it (or attempt to download it) for you.  let me know
 
i gotta run,
 
--malea
 
ps-- jim  i will be using e-mail and would like to link up some "pen-pals" or
something to break the isolation of the classroom.