Abstract

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