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The battle for the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people is long since lost, but a different sort of battle involving hearts and minds has been joined in our undergraduate literature courses. An influential and increasingly vocal element in our profession is suggesting that these courses should be organized around questions raised by critical theory rather than around the texts themselves in their traditional groupings by genres, themes, and historical periods. Not surprisingly, the suggestion is being met with something less than enthusiasm on the part of those who believe, Stanley Fish notwithstanding, that there are numerous texts in their classes, and that some sort of minimally mediated encounter with each should be the starting point of literary education. These textophiles are alarmed over what seems to them a potentially fatal neglect of heart, of emotional immediacies and humanistic sympathies, in the introductory process, while the theorophiles brood over the slight rendered to mind if the presence of unacknowledged preconceptions is condoned at any stage. Since such preconceptions are inevitably present and can be demonstrated by a rigorous logic not suited to matters of the heart, it would seem that the strategic prospects of the text-defenders are bleak. Nonetheless, I would like to enlist myself in their ranks, and see whether there might not be valid arguments for a provisional privileging of the text over its theoretical contexts, at least for students unfamiliar with either. In a casual conversation some years ago with William Gass, who has managed-like Iris Murdoch-to combine the careers of novelist and philosophy teacher, I asked whether he also taught occasional literature classes. His unequivocal no was followed by an explanation that I find apropos of some of our current professional dilemmas. He didn't care, he said, whether his philosophy students liked Plato or not; he was concerned only that they understand Plato's thought. But when some sophomoric ephebe-or words to that effectannounced that he didn't like Henry James, he felt an immediate, visceral surge Dwight Eddins is a professor of English at the University of Alabama. His articles have appeared in such journals as ELH and Modern Language Quarterly. He has just finished a book on Thomas Pynchon.

As most everyone teaching literature must know by now, the various kinds of study and analysis grouped under the rubrics of new criticism and formalism are very much in retreat. What most of us learned in college and graduate school by way of analytical method, and indeed what has been the dominant mode of teaching and discussing literature in the United States during the last fifty years, we have been urged to renounce. While unquestionably it is good that teachers develop a fresh perspective on what they are doing, for many such renunciation is an unsettling, and even painful and threatening, prospect. For me it involves denying the neo-Aristotelianism to which I was introduced over twenty years ago by my most thoughtful and persuasive English professor-an attitude, a rigor, and an analytical method that were the cornerstones of his teaching and critical writing, and that I still respect as probably the most flexible and fruitful way of asking certain key questions about what we read. Broadly speaking, this method insists on examining the unifying principle of a literary text-that principle of inclusion and ordering that best explains what elements make up the text, how they are arranged, and to what ends. A good deal of my early interest in the neo-Aristotelian enterprise centered on what I perceived to be its tolerant, non-authoritarian manner-which is ironic in light of how it and related methodologies have come to be attacked for their narrowness and rigidity. At any rate, it has hardly surprised me, at least, that many of the chief proponents of critical pluralism, notably Wayne Booth, have come out of this approach. Nor, I think, is it surprising that the proportion of attention I myself have come to give matters of form and shaping principles in the fiction, poetry, and drama I teach has fallen off sharply during my teaching career. Of course, even at the beginning, though I talked of little besides form and shaping principles, I did so largely without the jargon of Aristotelianism, and was never so much concerned with my students' my analysis of a particular poem or novel as with their learning how to read more formally, how to ask the questions of texts. But even my notion of what were the right questions soon began to broaden. For example, many years before I knew of reader-response criticism, I began

A belief shared by teachers of writing, one that we fervently try to inculcate in our students, is that revision can improve writing. This notion, that revision generally results in better text, often pairs up with another assumption, that revision occurs as we work through separate drafts. Thus, hand in your working drafts tomorrow and the final ones next Friday is a common assignment, as is the following bit of textbook advice: the draft is completed, a good critical reading should help the writer re-envision the essay and could very well lead to substantial rewriting (Axelrod and Cooper 10). This textbook advice, hardly atypical, is based on the rationale that gaining distance from a piece of discourse helps the writer to judge it more critically. As evidence for this assumption, Richard Beach's 1976 study of the self-evaluation strategies of revisers and nonrevisers demonstrated that extensive revisers were more capable of detaching themselves and gaining aesthetic distance from their writing than were nonrevisers. Nancy Sommers' later theoretical work on revision also sensitized us to students' need to re-see their texts rather than to view revision as an editing process at the limited level of word changes. A logical conclusion, then, is to train student writers to re-see and then redraft a piece of discourse. There are other compelling reasons for helping students view first or working drafts as fluid and not yet molded into final form. The opportunities for outside intervention, through teacher critiques and suggestions or peer evaluation sessions, can be valuable. And it is equally important to help students move beyond their limited approaches and limiting tendency to settle for whatever rolls out on paper the first time around. The novice view of a first draft as written-in-stone (or fast-drying cement) can preclude engaging more fully with the ideas being expressed. On the other hand, we have to acknowledge that there are advantages in being able, where it is appropriate, to master the art of one-draft writing. When students write essay exams or placement essays and when they go on to on-the-job writing where time doesn't permit multiple drafts, they need to produce first drafts which are also coherent,

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Literary theories put forward by Stanley Fish, David Bleich, Walter Michaels, and Jonathan Culler all insist, to varying degrees, that any individual critic's view of a particular literary text is likely to be affected by certain assumptions (schemata) shared by the community of scholars to which the critic belongs. Literary interpretation, so the argument goes, is not a matter of individual perception alone; every interpretation is both a process of individual discovery and a product of shared interpretive strategies. From this reader-response perspective, then, the prior assumptions held by the interpretive community are crucial constituents of the discourse, and often, as in the case of the Canadian interpretive response, such shared assumptions form the paradigm that in time becomes the locus of critical authority. Canadian criticism, in particular that branch which focuses on prairie fiction, offers an intriguing case study of just such an interpretive community at work. Canadian literary criticism has long spoken if not with one voice then at least with a widely-shared critical intent: to further the aims of cultural nationalism by establishing a critical narrative that privileges those aspects of Canadian literature-the lonely prairie landscape, the implacable brooding force of Nature, the sense of human isolation-that are historically associated with the early Canadian pioneer experience and the process of nation-building. Once accepted, the narrative assumes paradigmatic status: it establishes a closed frame of reference marked by remarkable critical consensus. Such a state of critical concord has not gone unnoticed. In his retrospective look at the teaching of Canadian literature, John Harker explains that

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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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I hadn't realized I was so ignorant, Celie. The little I knew about my own self wouldn't have filled a thimble! And to think Miss Beasley always said I was the smartest child she ever taught! But one thing I do thank her for, for teaching me to learn for myself, by reading and studying and writing a clear hand. And for keeping alive in me somehow the desire to know. Nettie, The Color Purple The central tasks of pedagogy are, and have always been, to teach others how to teach themselves and to instill the desire to know. The difficulty of teaching lies in the resistance of both student and teacher to the truth underlying the pedagogical act. Resistance is a commonly-used term in both pedagogy and psychoanalysis. It could be argued that, within either discipline, theory encounters practice as a kind of resistance; or that in relation to a psychoanalytic theory of teaching, pedagogy as practice assumes some autonomy in resisting the theory on which it is founded. Unlike traditional pedagogy, however, psychoanalysis can claim a coherent relation between theory and practice as part of its self-definition: everything that psychoanalysis teaches derives from the dynamics of a particular drama, that unfolding between the and the analysand. Crucial to this drama is the education of the analyst, which itself hinges on an analysis that teaches theory through practice. Freud believed that no amount of theoretical instruction could convince his students of the truth of psychoanalysis even where there was a strong wish to be convinced. Consequently, he required that everyone who wishes to treat others by analysis should first undergo an analysis himself. Only in the course of this 'self-analysis' [by which Freud means 'training analysis'] . . . , when he actually experiences in his own person, or rather in his own psyche, the processes asserted by analysis to take place, does he acquire the convictions by which he will later be guided as an analyst (Question 39). The truth of psychoanalytic theory can be grasped only through the subjective experience of psychoanalysis. But this truth has less to do with the verification Patrick McGee is an assistant professor of English at Louisiana State University. Recently, he has published articles on William Faulkner, James Joyce, and contemporary criticism. He has a book forthcoming from the University of Nebraska Press in 1988 entitled Paperspace: Style as Ideology in Joyce's Ulysses.

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

This special double issue of College English in some ways illustrates what its essays are about, possibly the resistance, as Freud said about analysis, against the uncovering of resistances (Analysis 239). This first issue begins where a Freudian approach to pedagogy necessarily starts, with the Freudian concept of resistance-four essays, by Barbara Johnson and Marjorie Garber, Patricia Donahue and Ellen Quandahl, Patrick McGee, and Robert Brooke, dealing with blockages theoretical and practical to reading and to teaching. The second issue, with essays by Gregory Ulmer, Gregory Jay, and Ronald Schleifer, moves beyond to explore Freud's concept of the as it bears on the role of the teacher (the subject who is supposed to know), the student, learning, teaching, reading, and so on. The essays of both issues argue that the to reading and teaching is also the force that makes them possibleparticularly that reading and teaching must in an important sense fail before they succeed. This claim arises in relation to Freud's discussion of the to therapy and Paul de Man's resistance to and from specific comparisons of the classroom and the therapy session. The course of these essays will move from (1) a consideration of and its place in a Freudian approach to pedagogy, (2) to a theory of the subject for a Freudian account of student/teacher interaction, and (3) to a theory of Freudian discourse as a communication model. All of these essays, but especially those in the second issue, then move toward another consideration-the ideological critique of what teachers teach and how they teach it. These special issues of College English also illustrate the they are talking about in that a few contributors bowed out early-schedules busier than

NCTE 1986 Task Force on Racism and Bias in the Teaching of English, Policy Expanding Opportunities: Academic Success for Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students, College English, Vol. 49, No. 5 (Sep., 1987), pp. 550-552

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The role of the reader in how the meaning of a text is formed has been a nearly obsessive concern of recent critical thought. Books and articles abound taking one stand or the other on the question of where meaning lies: in the text, in the reader, in the intentions of the author, in the intertext, in the practices of interpretive communities, and so on. For the most part, such talk tends to be seen as a kind of elegant diversion-the stuff of graduate seminars and doctoral thesessomewhat removed from the more practical tasks of teaching our students to read intelligently and to write with conviction. And certainly things seem to go on pretty much as they always have in most classes on literature-that is, texts get assigned to be read and papers to be written, students plow more or less dutifully through both, some haggling over meanings and grades takes place, and students and teachers alike go home at the end of the term, having done Shakespeare, or the Seventeenth Century, or the Modern Novel, or even Literary Theory. The writings of Jacques Derrida and Wolfgang Iser and Stanley Fish haven't changed that, and I doubt that any theory of reading ever will. But while theories of reader-response or deconstruction may seem to have had little effect on the practice of teaching literature, they do hold much in common with how many of us try to teach writing. The reasons for this are fairly plain. The meanings of most texts read in literature classes really are pretty stable-not because they hold some sort of intrinsic fixed messages, but simply because they are familiar texts that we, as a community of readers at the university, have long agreed on how to go about interpreting. This isn't the case, though, when we read student writing. Then we are faced with texts that are both new to us and whose meanings have often not yet been fixed even in the minds of their authors. In a freshman writing class the instability of meaning is a fact of life, not a point of critical debate. Nowhere else is the importance of a reader's expectations, of interpretive codes, shown more clearly. Where we look for analysis, our students often appeal to emotion; where we expect example, they call on popular sentiment, what everybody knows. The problem is not that our students are dumb, but that they're not yet members of the club-they don't know the sorts of things we as academics look for when we read. And so one way of looking at our task as teachers of writing is to see it as helping our students to confront the kinds of talk that go on at the university, to think about the values and assumptions that underlie such discourse. Joseph Harris teaches writing at Temple University.

I am coming on my twentieth year of teaching composition to college freshmen, and my fifteenth administering a composition program. These anniversaries incite me to think about the circles we who teach writing have perambulated in that time-to count the ways we have, for worse and better, changed how we shape composition programs, how we manage those programs, and how we teach the courses in them. From the fifties through my days as a student and then as a new teacher, rhetoric-meaning the analysis and presentation of arguments-dominated college composition programs. But at many colleges then, the English requirement included a literature survey, and composition programs often and awkwardly stirred rhetoric and literature in one pot. For example, research papers were on literary topics, an approach that encouraged publishers to produce hundreds of excellent casebooks, all recycled long ago. The rhetorical lion and literary lamb did not get on amicably, however. They tussled. The lamb often turned wolfish. The experiential programs of the early seventies-with their emphasis on narration and description, on journal writing, on films and visual arts as aids to invention-were a victory for the literateurs, and their last hour. For then came graduate programs in composition, and the gospel of process was heard in the land. Rhetoric-now meaning heuristic strategies-ascended. Literature became, and has remained, a negligible part of most composition programs. And today, as the slogan Writing Across the Curriculum is blazoned on textbook covers and eagerly mouthed by deans who see a way to save a buck, literaturemeaning the study of fiction, drama, and perhaps even (though that's radical) poetry for their own sweet sakes-dwindles to a thin shade in freshman writing

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Teaching with great literature gives me the feeling of being anointed yet unworthy; still feel compelled to bring great works into my classroom. Any teacher of freshman composition needs to be grounded, but an adjunct teacher of freshman composition needs to be especially grounded. So, ground myself on the likes of Martin Luther King, Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Einstein, Lao Tzu, Gertrude Stein, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Stafford, Plato, and James Joyce. feel somewhat brazen in doing so, for am not a superpowered specialized scholar, but love these works and believe in their power of conversion. believe they are not meant to be our sacred and closeted gems, but our air and food and water and shelter. It has been my experience that there has been a shift in composition courses, away from reading literature until basic skills have been learned. have found that literature can be used to teach grammar and pass on the goods at the same time. The writers mentioned above are on my guest list, and for the most part am in the business of toying with my guests. Halfway through the semester, hand out a section of Martin Luther King Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech where I've deliberately tampered with grammar, spelling, and punctuation, and expect my students to right my wrongs. count on their ears, which believe more dependable than their ability to memorize a list of ever-changing rules. I've reduced the Tomorrow .. . passage in Macbeth to a discussion of subject and predicate. But it's with my most precious saint of words, Mr. Joyce, that I've truly tested my students. At the end of the semester, my students must add punctuation and in other ways make articulate the last six hundred words of Molly Bloom's poignant rambling soliloquy-the so-called stream of consciousness.' This exercise has on occasion gotten me into the deeper waters of the English Department. At first glance it appears to test the student's ability to tolerate tedium, but when students look at it a second time, they realize that they are being called upon to translate the stuff of dreams into the stuff of tangible communication-which is indeed hard work. When readers take it upon themselves to look at this block of unpunctuated prose, they will see that the option is to either sink or swim. One either remains barred from the private sea of consciousness, and, dumbstruck and resentful,

Over last decade collaborative learning has become an important method for college English teachers, who now realize that their own education rarely taught them how colleagues work together learn and make meaning in discipline, and who have rejected philosophically kinds of approaches teaching that isolate learners instead of drawing them together. In addition, problems for education in seventies and eighties-the changes in student populations, growth in number of nontraditional learners in collegiate body, alienating nature of learning in large classrooms with too many students, acknowledged decline of freshmen entry-level skills in reading, writing, speaking, listening, and thinking-these and other challenges an earlier educational paradigm have shaken our faith in conventional teaching strategies and have called question our obsession with major metaphor for learning over last three hundred years, the human mind as Mirror of Nature. As Ken Bruffee has put it, this old metaphor insists that teachers give students as much information as they can to insure that their mental mirrors reflect reality as completely as possible and also insists that we help our students through exercise of intellect or development of sensibility, sharpen and sensitize their inner eyesight (Liberal Education 98). In this ground-breaking essay, Bruffee, drawing upon works of Thomas Kuhn, L. S. Vygotsky, Jean Piaget, M. L. J. Abercrombie, and Richard Rorty, advances an alternate concept of knowledge as socially justified belief. According this concept, knowledge depends on social relations, not on reflections of reality. Knowledge is a collaborative artifact (103) that results from intellectual negotiations (107). Bruffee explores curricular implications of knowledge collaboratively generated, always with one eye on classroom and other on philosophical underpinnings of new paradigm. But Bruffee's model, built on delicate and necessary tension between theory and practice, may not, I suspect, have guided much of what teachers are calling collaborative learning today. I mention this suspicion out of my recent investigations into issue of assessment generally as force in postsecondary

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Like all second editions, the new version of Richard Graves' Rhetoric and Composition: A Sourcebook for Teachers implies the success of the first edition. But that success itself also radiates questions about the nature and purposes of the courses that might use the book, about the texts with which it competes in the marketplace, about what prompts a second edition, and about the relationship of such textbooks and courses graduate education in English. All these questions frame the larger issue of the continuing emergence of composition studies. Any course using the Graves book (or one of its competitors) is a relatively new one because composition instructors have had rely, until recently, on an informal curriculum for their training. To be sure, there have been exceptions such as Fred Newton Scott, who in the early decades of this century trained graduate students at the University of Michigan in what might today be described as composition studies. And Herbert Cheek reports in his retrospective Forty Years of Composition Teaching (College Composition and Communication, 6 [1955], 4-10) that some universities began by 1940 to have distinguished specialists in linguistics, in semantics, and in logic who were graduate students how apply what they could learn about these subjects composition teaching (p. 9). Most instructors of writing have, however, learned through the informal curriculum of ideas gleaned from self-sponsored reading, orientation sessions, and conversations with other instructors, rather than in graduate classes. When Harold Allen made his 1951-52 tour of forty-seven composition programs, he found only five graduate courses on composition, and not all of the five were offered regularly (Preparing the Teachers of Composition and Communication-A Report, CCC, 3 [1952], 3-13).