Widening the Circle: Collaborative Reading with Louis Owens's Wolfsong

Abstract

tance between people, ironically by widening the circle. It is a forum that enables those with Internet access to engage ideas, symbols, and unique voices from around the world. Cyberspace is simultaneously everywhere and nowhere, reducing communication barriers created by distances in space. This phenomenon is eminently important to teachers, especially teachers of literature. In an era when scholars are searching for better ways to understand authors from diverse back grounds, the Internet creates the capacity for people in a classroom to interface, sometimes directly, with the writers they study. For writers and readers of American Indian literatures, the digital revolution has often been engaged as a means of storing information. Native language revitalization programs across the continent are us ing computers in classrooms, and some tribes even provide Internet surfers with the ability to download phrases and fonts from Indig enous languages. Many literary and scholarly journals publish origi nal works on their Web sites, often with links to tribal resources or authors' Web pages. The Internet Public Library offers an excellent catalog of information on hundreds of Indigenous writers. And de spite the accurate accusation that the Internet exploits credit con sumerism, Sherman Alexie fans who did not get to see The Business of