the pieces mentioned in the scott henderson e-mail reprinted below would seem to deal with issues that would be of both interest and relevance to first year college students if they could be used as material in comp/expos courses . . . but i'm sure i'm very far from the only one who has found that giving them what might be called "routledge-speak" as reading material is a sure recipe for big-time disaster . . . my students have almost no experience in reading, and they have enough trouble with prose on the level of, say, a N.Y. Times op-ed piece; they are quite literally helpless before the allusions, premises, vocablulary, and syntax of advanced academic discourses on these topics . . . so . . . can anyone cite any materials that treat these subjects seriously but accessibly . . .essays that don't dumb down the material but present in without taking for granted that the reader is already familiar with the on-going conversation and with the vocabulary that cultural critics take for granted?? mike frank >An article I've found useful in dealing with some of the history and >development of 'hip-hop' culture is Tricia Rose's piece "A Style Nobody Can >Deal With: Politics, Style and the Postindustrial City in Hip Hop". It >doesn't deal so much with appropriation, but the the codes and meanings >identified by Rose link very clearly to what it is that is being >appropriated. The article is in the collection 'Microphone Fiends; Youth >Music and Youth Culture' edited by Andrew Ross and Tricia Rose (Routledge >1994) Henry Giroux's work has also addressed some of these issues, notably >the "borrowing" found in Larry Clark's 'Kid's' in an article entitled >"Teenage Sexuality, Body Politics, and the Pedagogy of Display" found in the >book 'Youth Culture: Identity in a Postmodern World', edited by Jonathon >Epstein (Blackwell Publishers 1998). ---- Screen-L is sponsored by the Telecommunication & Film Dept., the University of Alabama: http://www.tcf.ua.edu