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eighth or ninth on a list of ten items. Last year it appeared again, first on the list. Teachers of literature have also begun to talk about collaborative learning, although not always by that name. It is viewed as a way of engaging students more deeply with the text and also as an aspect of professors' engagement with the professional community. At its 1978 convention the Modern Language Association scheduled a multi-session forum entitled Presence, and Authority in the Teaching of Literature. One of the associated sessions, called Negotiations of Literary Knowledge, included a discussion of the authority and structure (including the collaborative classroom structure) of communities. At the 1983 MLA convention collaborative practices in reestablishing authority and value in literary studies were examined under such rubrics as Talking to the Academic Community: Conferences as Institutions and How Books 11 and 12 of Paradise Lost Got to be Valuable (changes in interpretive attitudes in the community of Miltonists). In both these contexts collaborative learning is discussed sometimes as a process that constitutes fields or disciplines of study and sometimes as a pedagogical tool that works in teaching composition and literature. The former discussion, often highly theoretical, usually manages to keep at bay the more

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Like thousands of other composition techers in America, I teach in a writing program that uses an anthology of nonfiction prose. Moreover, like a great many such teachers I enjoy reading and teaching nonfiction prose, and I believe that, by learning to read and analyze such prose critically, students can improve their own writing and, incidentally, their reading too. Still, I am aware that the use of nonfiction in a composition course is not automatically a good; the decisive factor is what teachers have students do with the prose and how they have them do it. Over the past several years I have also become increasingly aware that teachers are pretty much on their own when it comes to analyzing and evaluating nonfiction prose, especially the twentieth-century English nonfiction that comprises the bulk of most composition anthologies. In this article I want, first, to call attention to the paucity of rhetorical and stylistic criticism of twentieth-century English nonfiction and to offer some explanations for this phenomenon; second, to show why this lack of criticism concerns me and should concern other writing teachers; and third, to offer some proposals to remedy the situation.

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In 1977 Donald Stewart startled his audience at the National Council of Teachers of English Convention by giving them a test.1 Not at all to his surprise, Professor Stewart found that although the teachers assembled devoted forty-five percent of their working time to teaching composition, hardly any of them recognized the names of twenty prominent rhetoricians or titles of works by those rhetoricians. Professor Stewart did not include Alexander Bain on his list, but had he done so very few of the writing teachers in his audience would have heard of Bain. Almost certainly, none would have read his books on composition and rhetoric. That such should be the case seems remarkable, for a great deal of what has been taught in traditional composition courses derives directly or indirectly from Bain's work. In an historical study of the paragraph written at the end of the nineteenth century, Edwin Lewis describes Bain's influence as formative. Indeed, Lewis claims that Bain's analysis of the paragraph was presented and defended with the same acuteness and grasp that made him perhaps the ablest writer on rhetoric since Aristotle.2 Bain's stock, however, has plunged since Lewis wrote those words. The revival of interest in rhetoric occurring during the last three decades has led us to call into question what Richard Young calls the current-traditional in the teaching of composition.3 For those challenging this paradigm and attempting to improve or replace it, Bain has become a popular whipping boy, identified with a rigidly prescriptive, product-centered system. Exactly who was Alexander Bain, and has his influence on our discipline been, on the whole, salutary or detrimental? When Bain died at the age of eighty-six in 1903, major newspapers throughout Britain and North America carried the news. The headline in the New York

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The word refers to a way we engage in an activity. Doing something is difficult if we do it with effort and with some doubt as to the eventual outcome. Depending on the nature and degree of doubt, there are three kinds of difficulty. If we are having difficulty with something but expect from the nature of the task or the fact that others can do it that we will eventually learn to do it easily, we are having a transitory difficulty. This is the difficulty of riding a bicycle, the difficulty of getting up in front of a group, the difficulty of choosing between vanilla and chocolate ripple. Other difficulties we do not expect to overcome, though we think in principle that the task admits easy success and we can see that others have overcome the difficulties. These are continuing difficulties. I have difficulty writing, for instance, and I expect to continue to have difficulty, but I know others for whom it is not at all difficult. I think of this sort of difficulty as a failure to call on the right resources. For most of us, selfdiscipline falls into this category, or being honest on our tax forms. The last kind of difficulty inheres in the task itself, given our capacities. These no one does easily: resolving paradoxes or thinking of two things at once, confronting death or remembering dreams. These are inherent difficulties. The transitory difficulties a new teacher of technical writing faces are only too apparent. They include learning a new curriculum, discovering the needs of a new kind of student, making up assignments and grading them, learning the textbooks, gaining a feel for technical style-and, as Maxwell Smart used to say, loving it. These are difficulties we have teaching any new subject; they are not in principle different from those we would encounter if suddenly asked to teach a course on Nigerian paleoliths. Nor are they particularly difficult as these things go, for there is a profession of teaching technical writing, which we find we have inadvertently joined, and the experienced in that profession have sought to ease our difficulties. An association, a little magazine, summer programs, textbooks, and innumerable how-to articles exist which will help any reasonably thorough person construct and teach a course which will indeed help students. The fundamental principles of technical writing (figure out your audience, organize to

IT HAD BEEN A TYPICAL FEMINIST CONFERENCE in early March 1979, in Buffalo, New York, a kind of high-voltage pressurized capsule in which we enacted what we wrote about and discussed what we enacted. Only in this safe place, on this common ground, could we feel free enough to dramatize disputes that would, in turn, energize further insights: unfortunately, nationally visible star, in this case Dorothy Dinnerstein, was effectively silenced by her so-called commentator; three forty-minute papers were given in a session scheduled to last an hour; third-world women, now termed of color, were ostentatiously absent, to guilty dismay of organizers; a female psychoanalyst announced to an astonished audience that clitoris, which she called the woodchip, produced an insufficient orgasm until it set fire to real explosion or big bang in vagina; first of two male speakers strutted his stuff in a combative performance in which he chastised women scholars for hiding behind skirts of sisterhood in an effort to evade genuine intellectual competition; at a Last Supper that night, over spicy fried chicken wings, a specialty in Buffalo, one of only two extant American feminist Lacanians-understandably exasperated with all these difficulties-reacted by hitting other one with a crumpled cigarette package and calling her a bitch. Set heat of this hectic activity against polar expiation of Buffalo in winter. We were all desperately afraid, or so we repeatedly exclaimed to each other, of being stranded in Buffalo. It was during a hot ride in an overcrowded car, through freezing night rains, that feminist critic Annette Kolodny asked about our teaching in Indiana Women's Prison: she was especially curious about inmates' attitude toward feminism. As we recalled atmosphere of prison nights and realized their similarity to dramatic enactments at conference, we knew that she had articulated crucial question we had faced when we team-taught in prison two years earlier. For prison (no less than conference) had been a

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ONE OF THE VEXING QUESTIONS that confronts the college English teacher who teaches children's literature is that of what ought to be stressed in the classroom. We are, after all, teachers of literature, and it seems reasonable that we ought to stress the literary aspects of the texts we teach. This is easier said than done, however. Two problems confront the college professor about to launch into a semester of teaching children's literature: audience-both the audience in the classroom and the audience of children's literature itself-and content. What do our students want

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