Kyle > Recent Status Updates

Very interested to learn about this framework, and highest commendations for Jo-Ann Archibald for working it out with a sense of reciprocity (given that this is the Year of Reconciliation). Just the Coyote has more meaning than the English term trickster implies, it is important for non-Native readers and researchers not to jump to conclusions, but as she suggests, to have patience and actively engage with storywork.

I am both fascinated and fretful at the prospect of learning Aboriginal storytelling framework: it has the strong connection to the land and is a forerunner of ecocriticism; on the other hand, I can already sense my mind will continually make comparisons to Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell's archetypes, plus the most prominent storyteller in my life, Shakespeare (who is anti-indigenous - even with his London audiences).

I am both fascinated and fretful at the prospect of learning Aboriginal storytelling framework: it has the strong connection to the land and is a forerunner of ecocriticism; on the other hand, I can already sense my mind will continually make comparisons to Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell's archetypes, plus the most prominent storyteller in my life, Shakespeare (who is anti-indigenous - even with his London audiences).

Got to step up my reading if I want to get done by the end of November. Three chapters a week! The women in this part come off a bit worse than other places, proof that this is an elderly, moralist Tolstoy writing: they're either flaunting their cleavage in front of Murat, sending their khan-sons off to be massacred in the next, or having some strange djigit suck at mom's breast to form alliances between her own son!

In a brisk change of pace, the story pulls a "meanwhile back at the ranch" to demonstrate the worthiness of a soldier who would not have warranted his own chapter, yet his family's praise makes what came before all the more touching. Meanwhile back at the palace another prince gets news of Murat's defection, and his worldly courtiers fall over each other to impress Vorontsov with stories of the man's daring exploits.

Starting off with Ruth Finnegan, and finishing off with Shirley Brice Heath, Street is a little less dismissive of their ideas of literacies, plus a whole bunch of repeated themes: post-Norman conquest land entitlement, 19th century Canadian schooling, Vai indigenous writing systems... Not sure where all these topics are going, and with a cruel swipe at Luria and Vygotsky, I might have read too much of Street's book!

Not quite finished with his attack on literacy scholars, Street set up straw man and calls them linguists (even gives them a few names like Bloomfield, Deuchar and Lyons, etc.). While his flamethrower criticism spares David Crystal, I couldn't help but wonder what it is all leading to. Yes, Brian, there are a lot of silly theories out there, but what have you got that is so hot? Now get on with your big "new" theory!

With the final chapter, there is at last some evidence, cross-referencing of co-authored chapters, the Diana Masny and David Cole read each other's prose before publishing this book together. Their exiting thoughts on concept creation are both the result of problems and paradoxes as well as the cause of deterritorialization and upsetting assessment's applecart. It finally sunk in for me so now I need to read Deleuze.

Moriarty Street outwits another opponent, this time Sherlock Goody and his Watson-like Watt for detecting literacy's role in classical Greece. Their argument for technological determinism sounds a lot like that old chestnut "when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth" and while Street has not yet revealed his main objection to the improbabilities, a game is afoot.

Moriarty Street outwits another opponent, this time Sherlock Goody and his Watson-like Watt for detecting literacy's role in classical Greece. Their argument for technological determinism sounds a lot like that old chestnut "when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth" and while Street has not yet revealed his main objection to the improbabilities, a game is afoot.

Street takes down Olson, Hildyard and Greenfield a few pegs as he critiques their Eurocentric, mostly racist, views of unschooled, pre-literate societies. One can detect how he focuses into a beam of light the less autonomous and more ideological New Literacy Studies which will eventually hit a prism, creating new literacies, multimodality and the latest version, Multiple Literacies Theory (as in Masny & Cole, 2012).

One last spin at declaring a Multiple Literacies Theory has ideas flying off in all directions, including a timely notion about mapping the future of digital literacy (it is happening now, not 2 to 3 years later when the official report gets released). A cyber-revolution, science fiction languages, YouTube affinity zones and Muslim teens facebooking in Australia are other disparate trajectories this chapter maps out.

Perhaps due to the uneasy buzz of hearing Rt Hnr. E. May lecture last night, I am very intrigued by the political side taking of secondary English teachers in Tasmania. I could easily see myself as an essentialist, pragmatist or canon-defender; a revolutionary or a 'royales'. The resulting spiral of teacher identity emergence maps out a very familiar journey from first to second naïveté, at a key moment on my path.

So many strong multiple literacies examples in this chapter, you'd be lost without a map! Clarity on the virtual/actual as it relates to language, order-words being flipped to words of order and related to Chinese character stroke order, and finally a primary student reterritorializing an Alex Colville painting as sombre. Fascinating how a story about a cyclist and a crow has two days of starvation and ends in death.

Murat gets to experience Russian hospitality at Prince Vorontsov's place, and aristrocrats learn a lesson about kunak, giving another what one desires. Even mad General Meller-Zakomelsky learns how to give in to his subordinate while keeping his eye on the prize. Lastly, the wounded Avdeev ends up not being able to hold a candle up to his peers, and becomes a fascinating statistic for the Russian war effort.

While investigating the self with her collaborators, it seems like Dorothy Holland is throwing an anthropological party and inviting some big-named scholars like Vygotsky, Bakhtin and Bourdieu (most of whom I recently read) to liven things up. Great discussion on semiotic mediation, and I might just stick around to see how figured worlds play out, and if there is any connection to the online virtual worlds, I'm sold!

The fun thing about discussing literacy as a rhizomatic system is that anything can pop up at any time and still be connected to the text at hand. Therefore, Masny can refer to the smell of coffee, as she repeatedly does in this chapter, or watching a movie as mentioned elsewhere, and the connections to the main point can be traced back through interconnected passages. Deleuze explains it all: meaning is made or not.

Seems like David Cole didn't get the memo on abbreviations for Deleuze's key publications, but all the better to cite each one by year, to give a sense of when each translation had its influence on English education. While Masny territorializes her bilingual crossroad, Cole applies his theory towards how monolinguist educators would affect change in their classrooms. Not sure what erotic language-affects sounds like.

More or less a preview of following chapters for a collaborated investigation of culture, Holland makes an impressive start of combining critical and cultural perspectives on the discourses that shape our identities. She also gives the chapter a seemingly abstract title which turns out to have actually occurred during field work somewhere in Nepal and then she extracts a moral of oppressed people who climb up houses.

Masny begins her discussion in a roundabout way, circling over topics she already introduced a few pages earlier. A lot is made of the partnership between Deleuze and Guattari, yet so much is Deleuzian. Meanwhile, it is more obvious that the Canadian Masny and the Australia Cole barely have influence on each other. Immanence is defined in cinematic terms, but I'm still puzzled about what she means by lines of flight.

Concept creation seems to be a key term to understand while being introduced to Gilles Deleuze: his philosophical idea of disrupting the often limiting features of a definition. Both authors introduce related ideas, such as illiteracy, rhizomes and deterritorialization. They also mark out the places on the map where they individually examined Deleuze's role in founding a Multiple Literacies Theory, beyond multimodal?

Saldaña wraps up his musings on what makes ethnotheatre art by asking the same question, bluntly, to his readers, and while doing so evokes an excellent idea: there needs to be a 21st century Chekhov (yes, trekkies, not to be confused with the 24th century one). It is an idea so simple to grasp, yet so amazingly complex to pull off, that this has to be part of Eury and my class presentation at the end of this month!

Establishing practicalities and realities (while exponentially squaring them) of creating an ethnodramatic play, Saldaña writes optimistically about what could be done, based on what others have already done in this sphere. It's very strange then, that he follows this sensible chapter with a chaotic script for shots: a love story that cubes reality to the point of the surreal. An excerpt would be pointless.

Where was this book when I was trying to get together enough ideas to present "Digital Maps for Fictional Worlds" earlier this year? Who exactly is Gilles Deleuze, and why am I almost certain that I never heard of him before being handed this book? Looks like I will be discovering how well of an introduction this book will be, and writing about his "wild" theories of multiple literacies for my book review assignment.

Reading Saldaña's ideas on turning ethnodramatic monologues into dialogues has opened up the possibility of my research project in a more classical vein: similar to Jo Carson's Voodoo that is reprinted at the end of this chapter. Why not make the research I intend to conduct on one of Shakespeare's plays more playfully Shakespearean? More fun to perform with scene partners instead of frustrated soliloquies.

The dualism between the Cossack and the Russian sides continues to play out like a tennis match, the narrative ball landing in each court. Firstly, Hadji Murat is on the run from his own people, who merely want to appear as his captors. In the next chapter he gets to the Russian side, he and his men are viewed favorably, yet there is still some Russian grumbling about how the fierce foe now made into a smiling ally.

Taking someone else's words and making them into a monologue is the goal described in this chapter. How the researcher goes about it is a matter of artistic choice, not so much fidelity to verbatim representation. The organic poem style Anna Deavere Smith must have pioneered in the early 1990s seems a bit dated today, with the parsed speech pointing out the uncertainty in the subjects voice rather their storytelling.

After a scintillating autoethnographic pre-writing exercise earlier this week, much of what seemed laborious or hard to grasp in Saldaña's textbook now seems like just uncovering the basics. He mentions projects, like the Living Newspaper, that could just as effectively gotten the class off to a good start. I will be more attuned to the theatricality of my classmates knowing what I do about the storytelling process.

Culler hits the nail directly on its head by writing "literature is fundamentally an exploration of the possibilities of experience, a questioning of the categories in and through which we ordinarily view ourselves and the world" (p. 121). However, the notes on Latin anagrams must have eventually given rise to the Baconist code-breakers' misguided attempt to determine the true author of Shakespeare's plays and poems.

Culler brings characters as diverse as folklorist Jacob Grimm, psychologist Sigmund Freud, sociologist Emile Durkheim, activist Noam Chompsky and the Shakespearean rascal Paroles from All's Well that Ends Well into the Saussurian circle. As the father of modern linguistics de Saussure probably never would have dreamed what these close kin were up to with his own theory, even making it outside a lecture hall.