In summer of 1987, Donald Stewart began a survey of English departments, attempting to uncover changes in curriculum that had resulted from changes in discipline. Stewart reported results of his survey in a 1989 CCC article, is an English Major, and What Should It Be? Stewart acknowledged limitations of his study: he was considering only 194 colleges, and only 108 of these actually responded to his request for information beyond catalogue description. Furthermore, many of respondents indicated that their curriculum was constantly being revised. Still, survey provided an important window on English major, particularly with regard to options in creative writing and rhetoric/composition. Stewart found that only 74 of 194 colleges surveyed, or 38%, offered students chance to specialize in some aspect of writing in addition to literature. The majority of English departments surveyed by Stewart (55%) offered only literature emphases, with optional electives from other areas of English. Based on his findings, he made a call for the establishment, in all departments, of options in creative writing, linguistics (where departments of linguistics do not exist), and composition and (193). In our survey of writing concentrations or majors within English departments, we wanted to follow up on Stewart's survey to see if more undergraduates were able to specialize in composition and rhetoric.1 The initial impetus for this survey came from an e-mail discussion among writing program directors about concentrations in writing and rhetoric being offered in their departments. After several writing program directors informally announced new courses and writing concentrations, we thought a review of these changes

John Paul Russo. I. A. Richards: His Life and Work. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. 843 pages. Robert J. Connors, ed., Selected Essays of Edward P. J. Corbett. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1989. xxii + 359. W. Ross Winterowd, The Culture and Politics of Literacy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. 226 pages. Booth, Wayne C. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. xii + 557 pages. Chris Anderson, ed., Literary Nonfiction: Theory, Criticism, Pedagogy. Carbondale and Edwardsville, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, pp. xxvi + 337, 1989.

More often than not, when people write about the relationship of literature and writing, they either argue about the place of literature in composition classes (as Barbara and Francis Lide do in Literature in the Composition Class) or discuss, in the spirit of writing-across-thecurriculum, how to use journals, response assignments, and critical essays to teach literature (an approach Joseph Comprone takes in Integrating the Acts of Reading and about Literature). My purpose in this essay is different from either of those. I hope to suggest a number of the values-for student understanding and appreciation of literature, and for the effective teaching of literature and writing-that can come from having students work at their own creative writing in undergraduate literature classes. For some years, Twentieth Century and Fiction Writing alternated in my teaching load. One course features works in which literary technique is quite important and often very challenging for students, and the other course helped students develop some mastery of literary technique. By thinking about how to make both courses work well, I discovered that many of the activities and exercises of the fiction writing class helped literature students to understand key concepts of technique and to appreciate the subtlety and craft of the works they read. For those unfamiliar with typical exercises of fiction-writing classes, let me offer a brief list of activities that carry over into literature classes: