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poem in such limited time, even a poem as short and relatively simple as At Grass, is unreasonable. Yet our discussion of their answers and the poem itself in the following class hour was both amicable and profitable: they learned, in a collective and public encounter with At Grass, to read the same poem and to recognize it as the poem Larkin wrote. Even more important, they were able to see how and why they had misread it, to assess their private and individual performances as readers.

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IT IS A MISTAKE for you to imagine that my political opinions are those of a universal lover; but they are those of a socialistic artist.' So James Joyce declared to his younger brother Stanislaus in May 1905, when he was immersed in the composition of Dubliners and Stephen Hero. But this political-aesthetic credo seems not to have been taken very seriously by Joyce's critics. Modern discussions of Dubliners, especially since Brewster Ghiselin's influential article of 1956,2 have been devoted mainly to the stories' intricate and interlocking patterns of symbolic meaning. These patterns certainly exist, and they provide a ready and easy way of teaching Dubliners; but to do justice to Joyce's achievement we must combine symbolic exegesis with an equal attentiveness to the material realiti s on which symbolic meaning is grounded. In Two Gallants, for example, Lenehan's paltry supper may be explained as a debased reenactment of the Eucharist; the attribution of such a meaning, however, depends on Lenehan's debased status in the actual society of which he forms part. The critical principle involved is that symbolic form should not be assigned to a closed and self-relating universe of meaning; it should be derived from social reality (as represented in the work), and that social reality should be recognized as primary. Only then can Dubliners be seen to merit the particular status continually claimed for it by Joyce: that of a moral work. This status was asserted most memor-

Harold Brent, Beyond Student-Centered Teaching: The Dialectical Materialist Form of a Literature Course: Comment, College English, Vol. 34, No. 2, Marxist Interpretations of Mailer, Woolf, Wright and Others (Nov., 1972), pp. 212-214

THE NON-LINGUIST who has conscientiously tried to keep abreast of developments in linguistic theory may well be ready to give up. Linguistics, especially transformational grammar, has matured recently at an alarming rate, so that transformational grammarians may seem to have developed increasingly narrow interests and, moreover, to have become so embroiled in the muddy business of securing their own positions, digging themselves in on a narrow front, that whether they are involved in civil war or are continuing to extend the frontiers of linguistic knowledge is often very unclear-even to themselves. I fancy that scarcely a single transformationalist will bother to raise his head as Professor Chafe wings his way overhead firing enthusiastically but erratically in all directions. The outsider is much more likely to notice the high-flier, and he needs some help in assessing the significance of Chafe's sally-perhaps it would not be out of place to give him at the same time some reports from the transformational trenches, and to assure him that all is still well there. I shall assume that he is reasonably familiar with Chomsky's Syntactic Structures1 and the main developments in transformational grammar up to about 1965, when Chomsky published his Aspects of the Theory of Syntax.2 Not that I believe the college English teacher has any (narrow professional) reason to bother much about contemporary linguistics. On the contrary, recent developments in transformational grammar should make it perfectly clear that there is no hope whatever of making direct use of that approach to linguistics in English teaching-at any rate not along the lines of existing attempts. And Chafe's work seems even less relevant.

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Kenneth A. Bruffee, The Way Out: A Critical Survey of Innovations in College Teaching, with Special Reference to the December, 1971, Issue of College English, College English, Vol. 33, No. 4 (Jan., 1972), pp. 457-470

to many experiments with sensitivity and awareness games in literature and writing classes, especially in elementary and high schools. Maybe the feeling is that we can afford such experimentation there, because certainly the kids will be taught the same stuff over and over as they progress sluggishly through the educational system, so what they miss in rigor and memorization at one level they can pick up at the next. Maybe, too, since college is regarded as the last chance, little such experimentation has gone on there. When William Bridges scheduled a summer workshop at Mills College in June of 1970 for college teachers interested in humanistic education, in adding an affective dimension to their teaching, some 35 people showed up, from various disciplines, but few of them had had much experience with or even exposure to these techniques. But as a result of that summer workshop at Mills at least a few drops are falling into the experimental classroom bucket; this report describes how something as conservative as an undergraduate course in eighteenth-century English literature can be changed by the application of new teaching techniques. For shock value, I'll describe what we did first, and then pursue the qualifications and caveats; for brevity, I'll describe only one small portion of the semester course-that dealing with Jonathan Swift.

at which the men are employed, but most of the young women who apply for teaching jobs are unmarried. If they marry while they are employed, they either quit teaching to take up housekeeping or they go away with their husbands if the husbands move. Thus they leave the teaching field to go into situations from which they may not find a way out and back into teaching. As with men, the greatest number of women who enter the college field do so after completing a Master's degree. Since it is the practice of many colleges and universities not to retain an Instructor (which is the rank usually given a college teacher who has only the M.A.) longer than three or four years, the woman with an M.A. cannot expect to be permanently retained in a Department unless she does a significant amount of post-Master's work-usually from 30 to 60 hours of graduate work beyond the M.A. Though, of course, many women make an adjustment to this demand, as they also do to the simultaneous demands of marriage and a career, many do not; and it is these who for themselves

I POSSESs in good measure the impulse to nail down the truth about teaching once and for all, and on that basis to tell everyone else how to teach.

IF ANY ONE DOUBTS that we are living in changing, even revolutionary, times, then I suggest that he read the latest cure for the woes of Freshman English, that most universally taught college course in the United States. As expressed by Louis Kampf, next president of the Modern Language Association, the new cure-all is a socialist revolution.1 And a socialist revolution which will compel English teachers to stop preventing the rise of lower class students by dubious grading systems. But the winds of change are not only blowing in the colleges. Fredson Bowers, speaking of graduate education at the Brown University Commencement (June 1, 1970), though not so sure as Louis Kampf about the coming revolution, conceded that Involvement with life, not isolation in the pursuit of knowledge, is the current watchword.2

In the sixties in all English-speaking countries there was a marked swing away from formal methods of teaching writing and a corresponding interest in methods that are broadly termed creative. More and more teachers were persuaded that can't write writing, and that you only write well when you write what keenly interests you. The central responsibility of teachers became the arousing of interest in each writing task, thereby engaging the mental-emotional energy and creative resources of students. I have supported this emphasis, especially against attempts to push the secondary schools into comprehensive study of one or other of the new systems of grammar. But I have not seen any need to go as far as those who now exclude from their classes all reference

THE ATTACK ON NEW CRITICISM and traditional historical research in recent years has led many American academics in English and history to re-evaluate their teaching and research, and to reconsider the canon of their respective fields. For many this has led to a widening of the definition of acceptable evidence for study; oral traditions, folk customs, music, film and the mass media are now receiving attention from both historians and literary critics. The study of racial minorities and submerged cultures, such as the working class, women, religious groups and millenial movements, has also opened new perspectives. Nevertheless, much more could be done. Journals still mainly publish textual studies or accounts of parliamentary and administrative quarrels. Annually countless critical analyses of the novels of Faulkner, Conrad or Henry James issue forth from our university presses, and we are already inundated with surveys of consensus-making history. In the meantime, we have left unexplored the lesser known cultures which contribute to Anglo-American societies. These areas of study deserve serious attention both for themselves and for the insights they give into better known writers and movements. Black Studies programs across the country have proven invaluable for ethnic minorities and white students who daily grow more aware of the large areas of American culture left unexamined and unread. The same potential for teaching and study exists in working class studies, women studies, and Euro-American studies, not to mention the domains now considered more appropriate for the folklorist and anthropologist. The following essay is a case study in the analysis of nineteenth century British working class poetry, which it is hoped will provide a guide for research into similar literature in America, the Commonwealth and other English speaking countries.' While such working class institutions as trade unions, the cooperative movement, religious groups and musical organizations have all been studied to a greater or lesser extent, working class literature has been almost completely ignored, except by folklorists usually looking for rural throwbacks rather than industrial characteristics.2

of literary creativity have been greeted with varying degrees of enthusiasm or antagonism in literary circles. The spectre of Beardsley and Wimsatt's attack on the intentional fallacy justifiably points to a serious limitation on the applicability of such studies to literary criticism. It is clear, however, that explication of the psychology of literary creativity has pertinence to teaching. The current enthusiasm for encouraging neophyte writers to free-up, think about and express their inner thoughts, feelings and conflicts, cries out particularly for psychiatric intervention, not necessarily because of encroachment on the professional bailiwick but because knowl-

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their insistence that there is only one approach, the thematic. Both notions seem narrow-minded, to say the least. Recently, however, I began to question whether my disquiet had larger implications: whether the problem I saw lurking in those school courses was not a symptom of a much deeper problem, one affecting the in all aspects of schooling, one affecting what some people call the humanities spirit that infects the teaching of English, the teaching of art and music, the teaching of history perhaps, and infects these disciplines not simply in the high school, but in the college, in the graduate school, and in the elementary school as well.