I had promised after reviewing my past blogs not to glow about our future readings, but in Textual Power I found a few things to put into my Future Lesson Plans file.  I also found myself reviewing every other paragraph and, like somebody else had mentioned, wanting to bang the text and my head against the wall.  The language Scholes uses left me wondering.  Gee, do I know enough to be an English teacher.  I mean, there were years of voracious reading for pleasure and then the transcribing volumes of text as a reporter, the vocabularies of scientists and business people, physicians and those who specialize in the production of time release capsules, the pouring of grout into cinder block walls, any variety of very specific language, and Scholes left me grasping for my dictionary.  Belletristic: writer of letters.  Peripatetic: itinerant.  reification: the process of regarding something abstract as material or concrete.  These are a few of the stumpers I encountered.  They would comprise the first paragraph of my difficulty paper, were I to write one connect with this book.

The lessons that I would include in my notebook for use later were mentioned in class, so I guess that they are not particularly innovative, or perhaps Scholes came up with them and they have become commonplace.  I thought the rewriting of the story from a different character’s point of view would be interesting.  It would require a close reading and an indepth understanding of that character’s motivations. 

The most interesting idea, and it appeared early on in the text, was the breaking down of the text.  How many of the sentences were required to create the story?  Again, this would require a close reading, it would focus the reader, help determine exactly what the story is. 

Scholes, I thought made what could have been an entirely pleasant read, annoyingly dense, and his insistance that Hemingway must be read along side a feminist work was insulting to me.  Hemingway is a masculine genre, but to assume that women cannot handle it without a counterpiece to “soften the blow” is politically correct and likewise, chauvanistic.