Teaching a Postmodern Text
  Dr. T. Ravichandran

Postmodernism is a polysemantic and self-contradictory term: polysemantic in the sense that it is multiple in its meanings, and self-contradictory as it contains its enemy within, "Modernism," which it seeks to revise and/or negate. So a teacher would need to grapple with the definition of the term before plunging into the teaching of a postmodern text. Yet with no explicit and ready-made definitions available in the critical market, we need to fix the untenable, hold the protean and make a stand, though on a slippery ground.   full text

Editor's Note:
  Karen Heise

Who are this issue's contributors?

Service Learning and Prospective Non-Native ESLTeachers: Drawbacks and Benefits
  Malcolm Finney

A large percentage of the graduate students with the TESOL option in the Department of Linguistics, California State University, Long Beach, are international students. Most of them, if not all, plan or hope to become ESL teachers. This paper is based on a survey of international students who took the graduate seminar on Literacy and Linguistics, a designated Service Learning course, in fall 2001. It specifically addresses the rewards and challenges that the students' participation in a service learning course would have on them in terms of empowerment and confidence as a non-native English speaker teaching English as a Second Language. Results of the survey reveal that in spite of some challenges, the consensus was that it provided a rewarding experience for the students involved.   full text

The Future's Enemies
  Heather Ouellette

Fiction:
Happy Thanksgiving, from Purgatory
  Karen Heise

Poetry:
    A Compendium of Eyes
    Woman to Man:  for Helene Cixous & Luce Irigary
    Poem for a Hangover
        Jayne Fenton Keane

..And eyes big love-crumbs (e.e.cummings)

i like your small bones and thighs of glass
cases. Such intricate woven strands of light.
Fibres brighter and glaze warm.
i like your small fingers. i like their flare,
i like their smooth. i like to watch their sparks
on my body and its bones, and the sparkling
- pat tter (ns) which snap
along nerve after nerve...  full text