Holding my head in my hands late one night early last Fall, I read my first batch of essays from my American Lit survey students. Wanting to stress the importance of close reading to our semester’s work, I had asked them to do close readings of a Dickinson or a Whitman poem. Some of the work was great, most middling, and some not very good. My head was in my hands because it was late, yes, but also because of the frustration I felt in the face of certain of the not very good papers. These papers exhibited all of the marks of the work of basic writing students. While some of the students had sensible and even remarkable things to say about the poems, many did not, and neither group was able to say them well. I’d asked them to read closely, but they seemed unable to write closely.

By the end of the semester, a few of these students were writing better papers. I hadn’t sat with all of them for hours and hours in my office. I hadn’t walked them over to the writing center. Instead, I'm convinced, two aspects of the course had helped their writing, though neither was designed with that purpose in mind. The first, their reading journals—required but ungraded entries due every day at the beginning of class in which they could reflect on the work in any way that struck them, including writing in the style of the author—had given them the opportunity to write often and freely. The second was simply their reading. The literature we’d read together—from Gertrude Stein to Langston Hughes to Thomas Pynchon—had helped their writing. It had done so in a number of ways; reading difficult texts, talking about how their sentences and paragraphs worked, writing about them in formal and informal ways had put good sentences in their ears, in Jane Kenyon’s words, had made them think hard, had immersed them in the act of writing. My role, outside of the classroom, was to comment on their writing as writing, offering ways for them to think about the problems and possibilities in their work. The results were plain, and there was nothing magical about it.     

Think about what happened as writing instruction, though, and what seemed pedagogically natural becomes suspect. In the mid-nineties, Erika Lindemann and Gary Tate staged their famous debate over the place of literature in the composition classroom, Lindemann arguing (as in the title of the 1993 reprise of her 1992 4Cs talk) that there was “No Place for Literature,” Tate countering that teachers of writing were being “denied… the use of literature” due to “self-imposed censorship.” These arguments, revisited two years later in a symposium in College English, generated some light and a good deal of heat. The question of whether the teaching of writing is enhanced or harmed by the inclusion of literary reading assignments continues to be asked and continues to touch on many issues in composition. Who teaches writing courses, how they are trained, the place of writing programs in relation to English departments in terms of institution, ideology, and respect, the politics of pedagogy, the place of reading in writing courses, why we teach writing in the first place—these and many other important aspects of the larger question of how to teach writing are raised by the question of the inclusion or exclusion of literary texts.

Largely absent from the question that has been debated by Lindemann and Tate and many other thoughtful people is a question germane to the situation I describe above, the question of the usefulness of the literature read in literature courses to the continuing development of student writers. This question is especially relevant to students formerly labeled as basic writers, whose writing once was assessed to be in need of extra work but, with their passage into and then out of first year writing, is institutionally assumed to have been “remedied.” As the growth and spread of Writing Across the Curriculum programs extends the course of writing instruction further in the career of undergraduates, the model assumed in restricting writing instruction to the start of the career—that there’s a problem to be fixed or that there’s preparation that needs to be done—can change. As this happens, these early courses can be rethought, seen not as the last chance but instead as the beginning, and courses “in the disciplines” can be reexamined for the ways in which they can continue work begun at the very start of the undergraduate career. In both cases, the importance of reading to that work, including the use of reading considered literary, in English studies, can be reconsidered. And the sketchy picture we have of composition “graduates,” especially those who went through remediation, can be filled out in greater detail.

Although there are many good historical, institutional, and intellectual reasons for the divide many in English studies maintain between the teaching of writing and the teaching of literature, one of the drawbacks to this divide is that the line between the teachers of writing and those of literature, like those between the subjects taught and the methods of teaching them, is often overdrawn. The institutional reality is that, outside of research universities, a growing number of postsecondary instructors teach courses in composition and courses in literature. Even in those institutions where composition courses are staffed mainly by graduate students, the tenured and tenure-track professors teaching literature (especially the latter) often taught writing courses when in graduate school. So, just as basic writers and writers deemed to be more competent don’t disappear after they finish their writing courses, the teachers who teach or have taught writing continue to teach these students as they move forward in the curriculum.

I make these fairly obvious points because they need making for their own sake and because the question I’m asking might seem better suited to a different forum. The fact that it might, however, is worth noting in itself. Institutional realities and historically-informed prejudices aside, the pedagogical divide between composition and literature can keep us from asking some basic questions—in particular about the connections between the skills and knowledge required for the acts of reading and those required for the act of writing, about the connections between the nature of reading about literature, writing about literature, and writing more generally, and about the classification of writing into literature and not-literature.

Certainly the pedagogical issues confronted by those who teach composition and those who teach literature are often different, as are those faced by teachers of basic writing. And it is certainly fair to paint a picture of English studies (as countless observers have, often with fairly broad brushes) in which questions of pedagogy are considered less frequently in upper-level literature classes than they are in composition classes. Still—or maybe, Therefore—it might not be a bad idea to think across these lines, to ask whether there are opportunities being missed in literature classes to continue the work of helping student writers improve. In intro lit, American and British surveys, upper division courses for majors, even senior capstone courses, are there ways in which strategies and techniques familiar to basic writing classrooms could be employed? Likewise, in basic writing classrooms, might the recognition (as discussed in Tom Peele’s recent module) that reading has a place in basic writing instruction lead to reconsideration of the uses of literature?                

My experience suggests that the answer to my leading questions is yes. Teaching writing and literature courses and working in Writing Across the Curriculum at a city university while earning my Ph.D. and teaching literature courses now at a research university, I have found that there is much to be gained from the reading of literature itself and of low-stakes writing about it in upper-level and even graduate literature classrooms, on one hand, and, on the other, from the use of challenging creative texts (poetry and prose, fiction and nonfiction) in writing courses. I have also found that Anthony Petroskey was right twenty-odd years ago when he argued that “our comprehension of texts, whether they are literary or not, is more an act of composition—for understanding is composing.” I hope that people will argue with me and with each other about all of this over the next few weeks. Some questions we might take up:

• What happens to basic writers when they are finished with their formal writing instruction?

• Why do we ask our students to read in writing courses? For models for structure or style? Themes? Or for cognition, as Andrea Lunsford and many others have argued? Depending on our answers, why would reading literature be appropriate or inappropriate?

• Why do we ask our students to write in literature courses? For testing? For learning? How do our answers to this question determine the way that writing is approached in the classroom?

• Why do we teach writing (i.e., why is it important that students learn to write)? For academic preparation? Professional preparation? Communication? Self-expression? Critical thinking?

 • Why do we teach literature (that is, why does literature get taught)? Best that’s been thought and said, etc.? Study of culture? Art appreciation?

 • If we believe that reading and writing about literature can help writing, how, and what can teachers at different levels do to facilitate the process?

 
Resources

 Teaching Basic Writing