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If is one thing contemporary observers of American literary studies agree upon, it is New must finally be transcended. William Cain, for example, protests New Critics' identification of with close reading of classic literary texts. It is not 'close reading' is itself misconceived, he argues, rather case for it has always been made at expense of other important things. Because New Critics won their case so convincingly, these other things have long been excluded from literary establishment. A list of costs resulting from institutionalization of New in 1950s, according to Cain, would include the rejection of other methods and other kinds of texts; misguided attempt to define (and thus defend) teaching of literature as, above all, 'close reading'; skepticism shown towards literary theory; and refusal to see other disciplines as having relevance for 'literary' criticism (New Criticism 1111-12). Criticism, in short, has become formalistic, to use an old critical buzz-word. Even deconstruction, as Cain correctly observes, is more an intensified continuation of tradition of formalistic close reading than a new, expansive kind of Fortunately, says Cain, there have been signs in recent years New Critical reign is at last coming to an end. The most important of these signs is the revival of 'history' as an instrument for criticism. This revival is result of work of certain critics and theorists-Cain mentions Foucault, Said, and Jameson-who have shown that 'history' does not have to imply-as it did for scholars New Critics attacked in 1930s-a narrow and naive review of sources, backgrounds, and influences. Rather, history now means the formation of an archive, building up of a rich, detailed, and complex discursive field. The ground for criticism, from this point of view, is not classic literary text, but inter-textual configurations and arrangements; 'criticism' thus entails study of power, political uses of language, and orders of discourse (New Criticism 1116-17). This reconstitution of ground for will produce, presumably, an analogous transformation of practice of close reading and expand domain of to include methods, texts, and disciplines suppressed by New Criticism. These developments, needless to say, win Cain's seal of approval.

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The theory that reading is composing-an open-ended, investigative, and active process-is hardly new. Over the past few years, writing teachers have turned their attention to reading and extended the useful term to describe not only the recursive movement among the pre-writing, drafting, and revising stages of writing, but also the construction of meaning through reading. The theories they have drawn on range from the work of reading researchers like Harry Singer, Frank Smith, and Charles Cooper and Anthony Petrosky to critical theorists like Wolfgang Iser, Louise Rosenblatt and Roland Barthes.' While it is difficult to generalize about such wide-ranging work, a quick review of the literature of constructive reading shows agreement on one point: the power of conventions, or schemata, to shape our understanding of a text. But the language for naming this phenomenon is divergent. Reading researchers describe the process of composing meaning in apparently neutral terms-comprehending, reading for meaning, learning from text-and some separate a literal from an interpretive level of reading,2 using Benjamin Bloom's taxonomy (89-90), influential since the 1950s. Critical theorists, on the other hand, show that all composed meanings are interpretations; this is the view we want to illustrate as we describe, theoretically and practically, a sequence of writing assignments used to encourage interpretation in our introductory composition classes. In our view, the same questions asked by critical theory-what is reading, what is the status of a text, how do we clarify approaches to interpretation-are questions to be asked by composition teachers, whose job is to teach students how to compose readings of texts, literary and non-literary, written and nonwritten. With this aim in mind, we agreed to define interpretation as a process of both reading and writing. We discarded conventional injunctions to look at the words, as if simply gazing at words on the page would force them into meaning. We insisted instead that good readers must understand the assumptions that determine what they see, that good writers do not wait for meaning to take

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