Literature listening to composition.

TEACHING COMPOSITION/TEACHING LITERATURE: CROSSING GREAT DIVIDES Ed. by Michelle M. Tokarczyk and Irene Papoulis. Peter Lang, 2003.

   Chicano Child Enters
      University!" the papers cried.

   Miracle child! Strange child!
      Dark Child!

   Speaks Spanish Child! Has
      Accent Child!

   Needs Lots of Help Child! Has
      No Money Child!

   Needs A Job Child! Barrio
      Child!

   Poor People's Child! Gente
      Child! Drop Out Child!

--from "Walt Whitman Strides the Llano of New Mexico" (117-122)

In "Walt Whitman Strides the Llano of New Mexico," (retired English professor) Rudolfo Anaya examines the impact of teachers and teaching on the lives of students, especially first-generation college students and minority students. In this poem, it is the intervention of a "wise teacher who said, 'Dark child, read this book!'" (149) that saves the "Needs Lots of Help Child!" (120) narrator in a college environment that had been, up until then, a "a labyrinth of loneliness,/dark shadows of library, cold white classrooms" (123-124). With Leaves of Grass in hand and mind, this student was able to "Leap to miracles!" (28) and thus survive in the foreign academic environment saying, "I kept the faith, don Walt, because I always knew/You could leap continents" (38-39). Leaping continents is exactly what Michelle Tokarczyk and Irene Papoulis do in their collection Teaching Composition/ Teaching Literature: Crossing Great Divides (Peter Lang, Studies in Composition and Rhetoric series, 2003). This collection offers a significant contribution to the field of English studies because the essays challenge us to leap over the divide that exists between composition and literature, to find a common ground, lest we find ourselves collectively consumed in the increasing corporatization of academe. The authors of this recently released collection recognize and offer ways to untangle what Peter Elbow calls the "history of misunderstanding and hurt" we have inflicted upon ourselves as English faculty teaching composition and teaching literature (148).

The "great divide" between composition and literature in English departments has been the focus of countless list-serve discussions, conference presentations, articles and books over the past decades. While many worthy contributions have delineated the often dismal state of English departmental co-occupation and conflict, Tokarczyk and Papoulis' Teaching Composition/Teaching Literature: Crossing Great Divides examines the bases of schisms between composition faculty and literature faculty (past and present) and offers constructive, diverse pedagogical and institutional ways to bridge "the divide" by disarming what Joanne M. Podis and Leonard A. Podis call the "discourse of discontent" that too often frames discussions between composition and literature teachers (119). This collection does not retreat from the "discontent" or deny its impact and immediacy. What the contributors do, though, is to urge us to reconceptualize our own complicity in, and relations to the ongoing debates, and invite us to emphasize first rather than last the values and practices we hold in common as English faculty.

The main commonality that is evident in these essays is that we often fail to recognize that as English faculty, most of us teach composition or other service writing courses, in addition to courses in our fields of specialization in composition or literature. Most of the contributors to Teaching Composition/Teaching Literature note that teaching writing provides them with a sense of accomplishment by knowing that their efforts in the composition classroom make profound differences in the lives of their students. Most of the authors also note that the techniques used in the composition classroom have been used to positively transform the literature classroom, that with the opportunity to teach composition, those of us who also teach literature are doing so in ways that explicitly reinforce composition practices of critical reading and process-oriented writing. Admittedly, some of the contributors seem to perceive teaching composition as something less appealing than teaching literature, thus seemingly reinforcing the division between the disciplines. In "Academic Writing and the Humanities: An Option for Literature-Trained Ph.D.s," Steven Frye and Eric Carl Link ask, "Aren't we really just trying to find a way to talk with students about subject matter that interests us, to find some way to artfully refigure freshman composition so it has a similar appeal to our literature courses?" (50). At the same time, Frye and Link begin by noting that "there is no reason that our composition courses should be divorced from the rest of our intellectual lives" (42). While the inclusion of literary texts in composition courses remains a matter for debate, Frye and Link are, like the teacher in Anaya's poem, trying to find texts that meaningfully engage students, including the "Needs Lots of Help Child" we encounter in our classrooms.

This collection does take great leaps to bridge the divide between composition and literature by dissecting fundamental contradictions and assumptions that have festered only to inflame the divide, including discussions that address the insinuation too often made by literary faculty that composition scholarship, by nature of its pragmatic applications, is of lesser academic value. Joanne Podis and Leonard Podis note in "Beyond Fear and (Self-) Loathing in the Composition-Literature Wars: Contextualizing the Politics of Writing Assignments in English Studies" that "we believe that, as a discipline, English must act upon its professed humanistic values of inclusion, equality, and justice, to bring the reality of its practices more closely in line with its rhetoric, so to speak" (119). That we are leaping the divide, bridging it, by reconciling rhetoric and praxis as Podis and Podis indicate is demonstrated in the pedagogical strategies delineated in the collection. Martha F. Bowden in "Teacher and Scholar: Reconciling Literature and Composition" contends that, "Because I am engaged in scholarly [literary] research and writing on an ongoing basis I am more, and not less, qualified to teach students to think of themselves as writers, and one of my continual concerns has been to make the composition classroom reflect the lessons I have learned about revision, collaboration, and the use of technology" (91). Marilyn Rye in "Using Composition Strategies in the Literature Classroom to Develop 'Critical' Readers and 'Critical Relativism,'" also asserts an important concept for those of us who teach both composition and literature: it is composition studies that has changed the way we teach literature and writing in the literature classroom in recent decades.

Many of the contributors to Teaching Composition/Teaching Literature address the ways in which the "great divide" has put English departments at a disadvantage in the current academic climate of increasing corporatization and reduced funding. Elbow in "The Cultures of Literature and Composition: What Could Each Learn from the Other?" maintains that "literary studies has become more and more a motley crew thrown together by history and change" (157). Being a "motley crew" has bred divisiveness, but that same diversity can facilitate positive change. In their essay "Good Fences Don't Always Make Good Neighbors: Using Rhetorical Reading to Bridge the Gap Between Literature and Writing," Judith Burdan and Julie Ann Hagemann allege that "We need to theorize more about what it means to be an English major, what common ground we share, how one option informs the others" (133). They include in their discussion the field of professional and technical writing, a field often excluded from discussions about teaching writing by both composition and literature faculty.

Tokarczyk and Papoulis' book compels us to acknowledge that, "the fields of composition and literature have a tangled history of misunderstanding and hurt" (148). What Tokarczyk and Papoulis suggest, through the choice and ordering of the collection, is that we may be experiencing a paradigm shift in the field of English studies, a shift that well could effectively end the disciplinary (and departmental) marginalization of composition. Two factors suggest this shift. First, more and more, recent literature Ph.D.s begin their teaching careers in composition and expect to continue teaching composition throughout their professional careers. It is important to admit that many doctoral institutions do perpetuate the composition/literature "divide" in the very act of relegating composition to graduate students and not having tenure/tenure-track faculty teach composition. At the same time, many of us who obtained our Ph.D.s within the last decade were told directly that most jobs are not at doctoral institutions but at schools where literature faculty are expected to teach composition as an integral and welcome component of our workloads. Second, the respect that English has for compositionists is evident in recent hiring patterns; the market is soft for literary scholars, but composition scholars are in great demand. This demand demonstrates the arrival, at the very least, and perhaps the centrality of composition to the field of English. This arrival/centrality, however, is limited as the majority of composition positions are temporary, adjunct, or non-tenure-track appointments.

In the "Introduction" Tokarczyk and Papoulis argue that this over-reliance on adjunct and part-time faculty to teach composition is the chronic and most obvious site of inequality. As funding for higher education is reduced, colleges and universities increasingly exploit adjunct faculty who are integral, at too many institutions, to the teaching of composition. Recent years have resulted in the loss of adjunct benefits (when benefits existed at all), stagnation of wages (and thus a loss of real income), and increased workloads as class sizes are increased to meet a growing demand for composition classes. These issues alone should compel us to common ground. Divided we cannot hope to wage the necessary battle to eradicate the two-tiered system from which institutions have greatly profited.

Teaching Composition/Teaching Literature: Crossing Great Divides offers substantive contributions to English studies by asking that we accentuate our commonalities as we develop pedagogical methods and scholarship, as well as work to improve our interactions with our colleagues. As Lynn Z. Bloom argues in "Coming of Age in a Field that Had No Name," "That composition studies now provides new labels should signal a closing of the gap between literature and composition rather than a demarcation of separate and unrelated concerns" (61). Tokarczyk and Papoulis' book forces us to see that we need to do more than read about closing gaps, we--each of us as teachers, members of English departments--need to act upon the ideas presented in these essays by engaging in sustained dialogue designed to have us "cross great divides." A good start would have entire departments collectively read and discuss the concepts presented in Teaching Composition/Teaching Literature as segues into the important work of determining goals and outcomes for composition courses/programs as well as literature courses.

WORKS CITED

Anaya, Rudolfo. "Walt Whitman Strides the Llano of New Mexico." The Anaya Reader. New York: Warner, 1995. 557-562.

Tokarczyk, Michelle M. and Irene Papoulis, eds. Teaching Composition/Teaching Literature: Crossing Great Divides. New York: Peter Lang, 2003.