Rhetoric Review Mar 1997

Composition, literature, and the emergence of modern reading practices

Dana Harrington Illinois State University

Abstract

In past fifteen years, scholars in both composition and literature have called for a more integrated approach to reading and writing.1 essays in collection Composition and Literature: Bridging Gap edited by Winifred Horner, for example, stressed common interests of scholarship in these two domains. Similarly, Modern Language Association recommended in a 1982 report that MLA publications make deliberate efforts to stimulate thought and research about interrelations of literature, composition, and rhetorical theory (952). More recently, Peter Elbow has called for end of the war between reading and arguing that the primacy of reading in reading/writing dichotomy is an act of locating authority away from student and keeping it entirely in teacher or institution or great figure (17). Richard Lloyd-Jones and Andrea Lunsford have also emphasized importance of an integrated approach to reading and writing in curriculum, one that allows teachers to foster student learning in reading, writing, interpreting, speaking, and listening (316). Like Elbow, Lloyd-Jones and Lunsford insist that integration of reading and writing not only enables students to become more active learners but also is critical for educating students for participation in democracy (85). But while an integrated approach to reading and writing is certainly a worthy goal, scholars in literary and composition studies differ on fundamental issues that may preclude (or at least complicate) our attempts to develop pedagogies that allow students to connect their own texts with other texts they encounter both inside and outside classroom. One such issue involves very nature of texts themselves-what texts are, how they are produced, and how we should read them. assumptions, for example, about what it means to interpret a text diverge radically depending on whether text is a student text or a literary text. As David Bartholomae observes: The teacher who is unable to make sense out of a seemingly bizarre piece of student writing is often same teacher who can give an elaborate explanation of 'meaning' of a story by Donald Barthelme or a poem by e.e. cummings (255). Instructors who interpret elements such as narrative leaps, obscure references, and twisted syntax as errors in student texts read same elements in a literary work as

Journal
Rhetoric Review
Published
1997-03-01
DOI
10.1080/07350199709359218
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Topics
modern rhetorical theory rhetorical criticism teacher development grammar and mechanics literacy studies
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