English 521: Composition Theory and Pedagogy

      No doubt my decision to attend a summer session of courses at the local community college had a tremendous impact on the eventual direction of my academic life. Most significantly, it edged me toward literature as my chosen course of study, simultaneously laying the foundations for my development as a writer. Normally I would have strapped on my backpack to travel the country as I had regularly for many summers before, but this particular year the administrators of the college, in what seemed an uncharacteristic move, approved a course in contemporary literature.

     Generally, the English department offered seven or eight thousand sections of required introductory composition courses (one and two, which one could take in any order, and I already had) with perhaps a single section of creative writing (though not this session) to stay on the cutting edge of collegiate curriculum. So, when I saw a notice posted advertising a real-live literature class, I rescheduled my plans and signed my summer away for a three-credit course. Actually, it was kind of a shot in the dark because no one--not the instructor, not the administrators, not even the perspective students--expected the class to "make", as they say in the biz, for it had never done so before. Lucky for me, it did.

     What this course did for me as both a reader and writer can not be understated, though for the reader's sake I will try to state it in as few phrases as possible. This class represents my first substantial engagement with literature. Of course I had been assigned to study novels, short stories, and poetry here and there before, but none ever approached this level of interaction with the text. These prior forays into the study of literature were characterized by a very rigid relationship between the reader and text, in the sense that he or she was a passive receiver whose personal insights or perspectives were beside the point. However, this contemporary literature course marked a very different experience for me, one in which the students were asked to form a relationship with the text and establish a dialogue. Once this dialogue got under way, it became easier to view the literature not simply as an isolated artifact, but instead as something produced--a product of the author, who utilized a particular writing process. What I began to recognize in the works of O'Brien, Morrison, Atwood, Shepherd, Garcia-Marquez, and others, was their skill and craft, in the artistic sense. To acknowledge this craft in writing naturally brought me one step closer to considering my own.

     The dialogue between myself as reader and the text for the class took on a specific form: a written response--one for each text. On some level, I am certain this sort of assignment served as a practical method for the instructor to make certain students had read the text, though it achieved so much more as well. Not only had I begun to read the literature from a different perspective than I had before, but I also had to interact with it in a sense through writing, as I had never done before. My conceptual dialogue became a textual one as well, and this provided the space where my ideas and interpretations developed. Furthermore, this written dialogue expanded in scope because each student's response was read aloud for everyone to hear, so that the texts for the course included this body of student papers as well. The archetype of solitary reader and writer began to fade away with the realization that we were performing these tasks together. Though some of these procedures and techniques were certainly not innovation or unique to this course, they were new to me, and something about the deliberate interweaving of reading with the writing process produced a lasting effect. Through our responses--our writing--we were not only getting different readings of the texts but a sense of those around us as well. Ideas and our selves all became part of the free exchange, and along with a student's cultural or theoretical perspective came his or her personality. (I recall one fellow student who was quite a query: it was difficult to determine his fascination with the word "microcosm"; he used it extensively. Maybe there was a misprint and it showed up on his "Word of the Day" desk calendar for the entire month of June.) That summer, Monday and Wednesday mornings (or Tuesday and Thursday--it was years ago), between ten and eleven-fifty, we created a community of writers and readers from our writing and reading.

     Fortunately, for a few of my colleagues and me at least, this community extended outside the parameters of the classroom.

     The catalyst was a lengthy and intricate written mid-term examination, on which I did rather well. Best in the class, the teacher let me know on the sly, and it is a success I unquestioningly attribute to active engagement with the texts and in-depth readings not possible without the accompanying writing. On the way to my car after receiving this grade, two fellow students ambushed me in the parking lot. Evidently, the instructor noted my achievement with them as well, an ethical breach I let slide because the girl was cute and the other a funny guy. They invited me to join their new study group, and I saw no reason to decline. (Mr. Microcosm turned us down, though, apparently engaged in an attempt to prove that man can be an island of his own.)

     Although we still communed to discuss the literature we read, in actuality, the study group took on more of a workshop form, where we would bring the drafts of our papers for class. It began simple: grammatical redlining here and there, marking comma splices, misspellings, and inappropriate conjugations. Very soon it evolved from these rather cosmetic issues to those such as topic, tone, and the thread of our arguments. The discussions previously reserved for the contemporary literature of our class, and in response to our final drafts, began to take place in the midst of the writing process, where these shared insights and readings had an opportunity to further flesh out our writing. Eventually, the textual base for these meetings expanded once more. It wasn't long before we engaged personal and creative writings of our own that were completely independent of the literature course. Although the writing took on different forms, the dialogue, both written and verbal, remained in-depth and helpful, lasting for the length of the course and beyond.

     This experience, though entered into as an opportunity to read, introduced me to the vital connection between the act of reading and the act of writing. Reading, for me, evolved into a dialogue that best manifested itself in my writing. This dialogue, then, was interwoven with similar dialogues entered into by my fellow students: I becoming a reader of their writing, and they readers of my own. Through these various levels of dialogue I find that I am no longer simply someone who reads or someone who writes. Rather, I am a Reader; I am a Writer; and neither one without the other.

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