Talk:Reading paths

I like the idea of the reading path or cluster. In addition to canons or course syllabi, we could make lists of books that are good to read together in order to understand something central to feministsf. But this is kind of a different idea than a reading list based on a theme. Each path would be like a guided tour... "read this, then this, then this, then think about this other book."

Or, for some books, "in order to understand this book, you probably should have read the following..." For example, to "get" Vonda McIntye's "Little Faces" or Lois McMaster Bujold's later books in the Vorkosigan series, I think you need a background in space opera and romance novels. This will help us to define a genre: the genre isn't a canonical list of the best examples of some idea - it's a sort of cloud or field in which we draw lines of connection. -- Liz Henry

Another example: Kate Wilhelm's _The Clewiston Test_ is directly referenced in Joanna Russ's _The Two of Them_. -- Ide Cyan 23:25, 26 April 2006 (PDT)

Glory Season is wrong, I think; I haven't read it in ten years. There are better examples of referencing Russ. So this example is screwed but I wanted to write some (even wrong) text. I'll let it marinate for a few hours. LQ 12:29, 27 April 2006 (PDT)

I don't remember any references to The Clewiston Test in The Two of Them. Do you mean "For the Sake of Grace", the short story by Suzette Haden Elgin? Anyway, I think this is a great topic. What about Zamyatin's We, Le Guin's The Dispossessed ("an ambiguous utopia") and Delany's Trouble on Triton ("an ambiguous heteropia")? What a strange trip! But the influence is there in the lineage. Does this sound like the kind of thing we want? --Therem 16:33, 27 April 2006 (PDT)

The Two of Them is dedicated to Elgin, "who has generously allowed me to use the characters and setting of her short story, 'For the Sake of Grace', as a springboard to a very different story of my own", it says at the front of the book. But there's a direct reference to Wilhelm's book: on page 142 of my Women's Press edition of The Two of Them, Irene says "Give me the Clewiston Test when we get back to Center; see if I'm mad." The context of that line is vital, because both works show the consequences of the power dynamics in a heterosexual couple when the man starts to doubt the woman's sanity, and this overt link creates a political dialogue between the books. --Ide Cyan 23:21, 28 April 2006 (PDT)

We/Dispossessed/Trouble on Triton is a great package, although I would also include some of Kropotkin's writings in if we're talking about backgrounds and not just novel paths. Glory Season had a lot of cities that were named after various feminist sf writers -- Brin's attempt to to pay homage, or join the dialog, perhaps. Other books have done this too but it's all a blank to me right now. ... Tepper/The Gate to Women's Country is best informed by understanding the trojan cycle. Tepper/"Beauty" is informed by reading some of Tepper's own work as a horror writer. Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time is informed by understanding some of the feminist theorizing at the time, including Shulamith Firestone. Russ in general is very responsive to earlier literature ... god, this could be so much fun, and already the wiki is sucking up way too much time that I don't have ... LQ 17:55, 27 April 2006 (PDT)

The NicolaGriffith list (nicolagriffith@yahoogroups.com) is chewing over some really interesting related concepts -- the notion of the influence web. This reminds me of Liz Henry's Digital Feminary poring thru & linking together all the subtextual & backstory references in Wittig's Les Guerilleres. Liz brings in the influence web from one end; the NicolaGriffith group are proposing to include that aspect of web of influences, plus the "user" / "consumer" end. I think this is concept, as it evolves, is getting increasingly more & more fabulous. Because we readers & fans are also writers, and editors; and putting us into the reading paths makes those connections explicit. And also builds for the future -- because today's gushing fan is tonight's fanfic rehash & tomorrow's published writer with "influences".

Anyway -- I think the trick here, for us, would be to organize it cleanly to begin with, rather than have to go back & tediously re-structure a lot of content that's already been put in. Organizing it well will make it really useful for newbies as well as the embedded & invested community. So my tentative proposal is something like this: 1-Reading Paths exist, as structures, discussed above--literary reading/media consumption paths for traveling thru the literature 2-The reading paths all link to the individual works & authors (and other things: maybe you have to walk in Greenwich Village to get some stuff by Delany, or visit the Exploratorium in San Francisco to get The City, Not Long After); each of THOSE individual entries, though, also has a section for "authorial influences & commentary"; "community response & issues"; and "personal reactions / responses". These would obviously very much link to and be about individual "fans", family members, personal biographical experiences. On wikipedia, this wouldn't work; many of these things would be "merely" vanity pages. But here, they work, because the wiki is not merely a (living, breathing, really cool) encyclopedia; it is also a manifestation of community.

Maybe it's unnecessary to say these things; they can just be DONE. But I like thinking about them. --LQ 18:57, 28 April 2006 (PDT)