Nestchick

The skater pulled her laces and cried, her face contorted in agony. Her lace had broken, could she start her routine over? The Olympics had been big news that year, and this was the highlight event, Tonya Harding's program. Tonya had her thugs whack Nancy Kerrigan over the knee, in the hope that Nancy would be too injured to compete. That was the word that was everywhere: whack. The plan had backfired, Nancy skated despite her injury and in time the attackers would be caught and prosecuted. The competition had become an event of heightened international interest, and I was watching it from my hospital room. I had been admitted on Friday afternoon to have labor induced. By the time my son was born Sunday morning, I had been in labor for 27 hours. So Saturday was given up to watching the Olympics and trying to stay as comfortable as possible. I had been given an epidural, but it wore off before the hard labor came. As a result I was in a lot of pain and wanted some relief. Every time

  The function of literary theory in academia is often purported to be one of uncovering and decoding messages that were already present within culture in order to gain a clearer understanding of semiotic codes. While this is a cause of noble intent, there sometimes is an interpretive chasm between the intellegesia and the rest of society. What becomes at issue is the validity of academic readings of texts (which may eloquently and convincingly argue about what the dynamics of works of art are and how they influence culture) and the interpretation of texts by those who are actually engaged in such a cultural process. Teresa De Lauretis' book Technologies of Gender includes an essay entitled "The Rhetoric of Violence" in which she quotes Pierce that applies to this very topic: "...immediate object's relation to the representamem is established by the interpretant, which is itself another sign, 'perhaps a more developed sign'. Thus, in a process of unlimite