Could we talk about Mary Louise Pratt's Arts of the Contact Zone?
 
 
 
 
I little while ago I posted a few poems that I offered  as poems about
the Catholic Church's control of reading, the Humanist
revolution took reading away from the church.
The Church controlled reading as an effort to control all biblical
interpretation.
 
Among many overgeneralizations, perhaps this is one we might discuss (?).
 
Does using the term `contact zone' as a way to describe the cultural and
psychological impact of reading devalue in any way the important political
and cultural value of the concept.
 
One way to see reading is to see it as a public space, contested
by different bodies of thought (regimes of truth) over lengthy time periods.
During the 12-14 c. the humanists attempted to seize reading from the
dominicans, moving it to the university where it was enlarged.  Today,
reading is being contested at the university by feminism(s) and several
ethnicities.  Historically, I have been wondering, if reading is a series
of methods by which subjectivities are contested, altered, maintained.
 
Of course, I am not asking about reading for content or reading for authorial
intent or for meaning making (I think).  But I am wondering about reading as
meaning made, knowledge reified.  I am not out to imply that major and )
and minoritarian discopurses (right all are minoritarian) are not leaky.
Resistance is apparent in the popular, etc. if not the reactive.
 
A convenient way be to organize a history of reading may be as a series of
contested moments in humanism/feminism/ethnicities in the university.
Humanism here is figured as a civil rights movement with obvious and
important limits.  Feminism similarly is configured as a civil rights
movement that critiques humanism and turns to reading the feminine with new
reading practices.  Similarly, the current ethnic production
of knowledge teaches us a further critique of humanism and feminism.
 
I suggest this historical frame (Always historicize.) is one way of overall
course organization that we ought to discuss, critique, and explore so that
it is explored on the list informally or formally as a possible way for
teachers to orient a course in reading, among other ways of orienting a
course that we make possible by our research and discussions.
 
It seems to me the narrative construction of such an argument places
its focus on feminism and ethnicities, but historicizes humanism as
a problem under interrogation.  The course would include texts that
depict readers reading from multiple registers in these historic
moments, organized chronologically.
 
Such an argument could lead students to see a need to diversify their
consciousness, to get a long view of the structure of knowledges at the
university, and to acknowledge the deployment and complication of their
subjectivity.  All in relation to the history of reading.
 
Again, may I repeat, I am not interested in arguing for one way of organizing
such a course.  I am interested in surveying many models of course
orghanization with those on the list and then excerpting or revising
those discussions in some sort of text for a syllabus guide.
 
What of the loss of geography in such notion of the contact zone?
What of other ways to talk about reading as a contact zone
What about other ways to organize a course on reading?
What about this way of organizing a course on reading?