I met with Allyson Miller in a dark pub over break. After a drink and a cigarette, Allyson’s brain sparked, and she expressed her astonishment at how little the ENG 1000 students are assigned to read. I presume Allyson meant novels and such, as opposed to “the world as a text” or “city life as a text” or “university life as a text.” She meant actual novels, canonical or not-so-canonical; the students did not seem to be assigned much reading. I expressed agreement with Allyson. These premises were based on all of the assignments we’d seen in the Writing Lab over the past semester.
Today in our fiction workshop, the issue arose again, and the smart and assertive Allyson expressed a keen wonder as to why the ENG 1000 curriculum seemed to focus solely on writing and not on reading.
The argument seems to be: How can you expect students to write proficiently if they cannot read proficiently?
On an intuitive level, this makes sense. Reading and writing go hand-in-hand, yes? I attribute my ability to write partly to my voracious consumption of literature from childhood to adulthood.
But perhaps this blog entry has been too general in its terms thus far. Our textbook, A Guide to Composition Pedagogies, also acknowledges this separation of writing and reading on a number of explicit and implicit levels.
Linda Flowers, a cognitive scholar, uses the notion of “writer-based and reader-based prose” (pages 5 and 10). I’m not quite sure what these terms fully mean, to be honest. The text doesn’t fully unpack them.
Here’s another nice tidbit from the “Cultural Studies and Composition” essay: “Rather we point to the lack of political will, as composition and literature remain largely polarized and increasingly at odds in the scramble for scarce resources. If anything, we expect compositionists to call into question the messianic role the field often assumes to ’save English studies from itself’ and to raise again the issue of separating institutionally from literary studies” (87).
The tension between composition and literature is clear in this passage. But how will this conflict, this polarity, affect us as instructors in the ENG 1000 classroom?
The relevant issues:
–Are ENG 1000 instructors discouraged from assigning “literary” readings? Does the act of “assigning readings” align itself with the strict, rule-based pedagogy of a stodgy, old dinosaur?
–What are the guidelines, if any, for an ENG 1000 syllabus in terms of assigning readings, assigning literature?
I have so much more to say, but I think I selected too broad an issue for my first blog.
And Allyson… I dropped the ball on this one. I think you owe it to the class to pick it up and run with it.
Humbly,
Eric A. Thomas
