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I really loved this statement in Peterson: "Instead, we need to discuss the nature and place of reading in the freshman course--how readers interact with texts, print and nonprint, to construct meaning; how individual, social, and cultural belief systems shape expectations and interpretations; and how an awareness of the construction, interpretive nature of reading verbal and nonverbal texts might promote students' writing abilities" (312). Here, we can see a realistic argument for why literature might belong in the writing classroom. I appreciate Peterson's discussion on why autobiographical works or memoirs are allowed in a composition class, when fiction works are not. After all, many memoirs have fictional elements and the risk of an unreliable narrator. To Peterson's point, the nature of the text doesn't necessarily matter. What does matter is exposing students to texts that represented different voices, cultures, and social ideas to make them more well-rounded. By introducing them to different texts, they'll be able to gain empathy and will learn to create writing with content that truly matters.

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What's becoming increasingly clear in the argument of literature in the composition classroom is that it points to an argument over technical or stylistic writing. Do we teach students how to write with correct grammar so they can one day write a nice email to a coworker? Or do we teach them how to be Hemingway? Steinberg's article "Imaginative Literature in Composition Classrooms?" points to this divide. Obviously we can't all be Hemingway (and probably don't want to be), but Steinberg explores why literature in a composition classroom can often lead to unrealistic ideas of what it really means to be a writer. The general argument in our field is that we should stay away from literature when teaching writing and instead focus on tangible things students can realistically achieve in their own prose. However, I appreciated Steinberg's example of one of his own classes: "By contrast, in an advanced writing course entitled 'Style' that I teach for students enrolled for the Master of Arts in Professional Writing, I sometimes find short examples from Hemingway and Faulkner, for instance, quite useful" (276). This got me thinking- if we are so focused on the technical in the classroom, does that mean that we fail to teach our students how to form a writing voice? And how important is it to have that voice?

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Something that Lindemann's second article makes clear to me is that the debate we are studying this semester has a lot to do with a teacher's perspective. Some of us are writing focused, while others are literature focused. And depending on how you see the functions of those two things, that is what you will lead with in the composition classroom. Neither approach seems completely wrong, either. But it means that there is no simple answer for how to teach an intro English course. For me, literature seems to always come first, and I think that might be because of my education and background. It's how I was taught and maybe because of how I interpret it and how I see the world, studying literature has only helped me as a writer. But that way of thinking might not work for someone. Which means this academic debate is much more complicated as it seems, as Lindemann points out.

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I really connected to Gamer's article. He gets at a fundamental argument for literature in the composition classroom: "People rarely just tell stories for the sake of telling stories; fiction, poetry, and drama may do subtly what essays do more overtly, but both are partial (in all senses of the world), both have agendas, and both seek to persuade readers. And our students, furthermore, do not live in a world free of compelling and interesting stories to which they must respond" (283). It's interesting to compare a work of fiction to an essay, but I agree with the above statement that they do have more in common than you would first think. And by acknowledging this connection, I think it is possible to go about teaching writing with literature. After all, writing is about persuasion and perhaps it doesn't matter what form that persuasion comes in.

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That made me laugh - when Tate said he was only bothered by the idea of literature being replaced by rhetoric in the freshman  composition classroom on MWF - showing his true uncertainty on whether or not that was a good idea.  I empathize with that statement because I can also see both sides and my initial answer to this argument is "I just don't know. and "There has to be a compromise."

Tate is concerned that "imagination" and "style" will go out the window if literature is forced out in favor of rhetoric.

I, too, could probably be identified a humanist like Tate suggested when he said he was far more interested in his students joining conversations outside of the university and that he's interested in the student as a whole that goes beyond their major.

I also agree with the idea of allowing students to read literary works and not being told they can't.  That reminds me of banned books, and I'm not okay with that idea either.  I don't believe any book should be banned because who should get to say what I can and cannot read?

I like how Tate concludes with adopting a "generous vision" of rhetoric and the literature and the composition classroom and trying to see how no texts can be excluded.

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What I'm getting out of this - I think - is that it's more helpful to inform students that discourses of different disciplines vary, so that they can develop an awareness of that when they're ready to enter a study.

I might add to this - but if someone else reads it, please let me know.. I don't know why I can't wrap my brain around what she's saying.

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Tate again. This piece was like an archeological dig; he tried to find out why and how lit got sucked out of comp. This one was written several years after his iconic piece on agitating to keep--or at least allow--lit in comp.

He softens his timbre a bit, which is probably for the best, though I enjoyed his fiery tone immensely in the previous essay. Scholarly pieces can get so tedious, can’t they? In short, he traces, through minutes of conferences, if I read it correctly, as keeping literature in comp seemed to fade from view, giving way for a more rhetoric-driven approach.

An interesting bit he unearthed was a comment in 1956 stating that the trad combo course “has been under pressure during the past ten years or so” (306). Rhetoric was snappy and forward-moving and it seems lit/comp, in the words of an old Seinfeld episode, had been played.

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I was particularly interested in the Lindemann/Tate debate. I read Tate’s A Place for Literature...first, then realized my tactical error; I should have read Lindemann’s first. While I have a hard time describing the piece, I’ll give it a shot. Essentially, she doesn’t think we can effectively discuss the role of literature in FYC without establishing why we’re teaching FYC in the first place.

She objects to FYC being treated as a cure for badly done high school English. Instead, she expresses, “Freshman English does what no high school writing course can do: provide opportunities to master the genres, styles, audiences, and purposes of college writing” (312). In doing this, she wants to avoid the grammar-focused, essay heavy, or what she calls, “great ideas” as the driving forces of a course.

Lindemann seems to be against courses that, as she puts it, focus on verbs like drafting, revising, and the like (313). I’m not sure why she’s not into that; it sounds great to me! But one thing seems certain, she is anti lit in comp courses. In her words, they “focus on consuming texts, not producing them” (313). Ok, when you put it like that…

I think this piece shows its age, when she writes the teacher talks for “75-80 percent of the time” (313). That seems to have given way some time ago to shorter, snappy, focused lectures interspersed with collaboration and learning activities. But, to be fair, it is a dated piece, being written in 1993. I was still in undergrad around that time, where we all rode donkeys to school both ways uphill in the snow, so that’s way old!

She comes off as a little bit of a hard-@ss to me, even being against using so much as one poem or novel to “humanize” the content, saying it’s already humanistic enough (313). She also disagrees that lit can teach style (314). I just gotta say: disagree.

She rather lost me on her rant about how teaching lit with comp is misused as a training tactic for grad students (315). As one myself, I can use all the training I can receive! I genuinely didn’t “get” where she got that or why she despises it so much. Thoughts?

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As I mentioned, I read this one first, which turned out to be a mistake in the end. Straight up, I was buying what he was selling. I snickered through his waspish repartee and I think in some way, it prejudiced  me against Lindemann’s counterargument.

His whole thing about how the Rhetoric Police sucked the lit--and the joy--out of comp made me laugh out loud (318). Indeed, when he said “The Rhetoric Police merely moved in and we all surrendered” (318) was a high point. Again, he comes in with phasers set on snark at, “I can't reopen the debate about composition and literature because no debate occurred in the first place” (318).

Witty ripostes aside, Tate seems concerned over the trajectory of FYC being turned into merely a “service course” for the rest of the academy (319). In his view, not only does that create an impossible standard to maintain, it sucks the life out of FYC.

I think his main point is the avoiding of missed opportunities by culling all reading out of writing. He posits lit in comp very well may have been misused, leading to a seamless coup by the Rhetoric Police, but it doesn’t have to stay that way. He wants us to consider a dynamic that discludes no texts (121), and right now, today, that sounds alright to me.

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After Lindemann and Tate, I moved onto Channok, who wrote a piece to tie in their argument.  I think she finds Tate a bit heavy handed; and while I liked his sass, I can see that view. He seemed a bit stompy on Lindemann’s ideas.

While she doesn’t rubber stamp Lindemann’s work, she seems more Elbowian, if you will, in what she believes; she quotes him a lot. Elbow mentions while he can’t teach every student every style of writing across the academy and have them be fluent in it, he can teach them how to be familiar with the different styles (586). I gave a rousing YES on my notes next to that commentary. I particularly like how Elbow refers to each individual discipline as a “cultural construct” (586). He continues on in his conversation about writing culture, and how “one can live within a new culture with or without losing one’s own (587). Hear hear! We need to hear more of that in today’s world.

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I thought Tate's second article about the disappearance of the argument of literature in the composition course really interesting. I felt almost a little too seen when he mentions historians have pointed to "both the use of literature because 'that is what the teachers know best,' and the fear that literature will somehow be contaminated in the writing class" to be a reason for this heated debate. I just got my first-ever teaching job that I'll be starting in a few weeks so I've been thinking a lot about lesson planning and I can't help but be a little nervous to teach writing. After all, writing always seems to be such an intangible thing. We know when it's good, but it's hard to explain how it gets there. And I also fear I might want to rely on texts too much in my teaching because that's what I know best. However, to think students' writing will contaminate the works of literature I love seems like an awfully snobby perspective. Sure, high schoolers' writing won't be the most refined, but just the fact that they're taking those works into consideration when forming their own writing feels special, not wrong. I do wonder why this type of conversation has disappeared from academia- could it be because teaching writing can make us nervous?

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Steinberg asks the question - originally asked by Richard Young and Maureen Goggin - What is the relation between learning to write and the reading of imaginative literature?  Then uses the phrase "practical needs".  What kind of writing will students be asked to do in other academic subjects and also when they graduate?  How does teaching literature work into that type of writing?

Steinberg notes a definite decline in the use of imaginative literature in the composition classroom, but also notices an increase in the topic of rhetoric in the composition classroom.

I do like the argument that showed how the use of imaginative literature could open up a more creative side to a writer.  I find I agree with that statement as people are inspired by the world around them all the time.

I don't have an answer to this argument at all - and I totally get why it keeps coming up.  I see both sides.  Without imaginative literature, we wouldn't have the Romantics.  And people are inspired by them all the time.  I'm reading a series of books right now where this serial murder focuses on lines from Shelley and Wordsworth and the Lake's poets and I wonder - where did her inspiration come from?  And which class did she learn it in?  And clearly, it has not affected her adult writing.

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I read this as well - and I found it interesting he quoted Booth as saying that "properly chosen imaginative literature produces results in the thinking, speaking, and writing of the majority of students that nothing else can produce so well."  This reminded me of the Steinberg article I read and how imaginative literature could open up the more creative side to a writer.  I fully agree.

I don't think there should be an either/or in this scenario.  I think they mesh well together - lit and comp and have always seen them as going together.  I think it would then depend on the teacher and their beliefs and perspectives - like Steph says in her Lindemann recap.

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Lindemann's main argument is simple:  "When freshman read and write about imaginative literature alone, they remain poorly prepared for the writing required of them in courses outside the English department."

I want to quote Mockingjay right now and say, "Real or not real?" And how do we prove it?

I looked up our course catalog at the community college I work at - freshman comp allows the student to study and apply rhetorical principles of writing in developing effective sentences, paragraphs, and essays, with particular emphasis on analyzing and writing expository prose.  It also talks about using a variety of texts on various topics.  I'm inferring that text doesn't mean literature.  The reading of literature is covered in Comp 2 here.

I looked it up only because I wanted to see where the literature was placed, because Lindemann talks about literature being more suited to a literature program than a composition program.  They make no distinction here.

She also mentioned the debate of asking what the purpose of a first-year writing course is.  I swear I've read that several times over - maybe last semester.  Clearly, no one knows, as the debate is ever-ongoing.  Maybe that just means it's up to the educator to decide.  What value does the educator place on the first-year writing course and how can those values translate into the curricula?

I really like Lindemann's point of what Freshman English should offer if we're going to "drag every first-year student through the requirement."  I like how she says it should offer guided practice in reading and writing the discourses of the academy and the professions.  I agree, to a point, because students should learn how to do that, but I don't believe that they should only join that community discourse.

I understand her arguments that literature-based courses don't focus on producing texts.  I get that, I really do.  It's more a focus on the literature and language.  I do think - and disagree with her  here - that studying literature helps teach style.  I learned how to use "less mediocre" (I know, Tate hates that word) words by reading other people's work.  She argues that style is taught as language to appreciate, not emulate.  I disagree only because when studying the Romantics and Lake's poets my senior year of high school, I had to emulate Wordsworth's "Lines Composed Above Tintern Abbey" style and language and write my own, and that has stuck with me.

Okay - someone help me out with her last argument - "It would enrich our training programs for graduate students."  Why is this a bad thing?  What am I missing?

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Steinberg: Not much to say that already hasn't been said...

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Steinberg: Not much to say that already hasn't been said...

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It is really difficult for me to really expand upon this issue, and I honestly don’t know why. Therefore, this writing will be very short. I feel like literature, in some way, shape, or form, is always used in a composition classroom. I have always felt, even as a student, that composition and literature go hand-in-hand. I do know that the crux of this article and others this week deal with using imaginative literature in the composition classroom (or being wholeheartedly against the use of imaginative literature). I don’t have any grandiose comments or ideas to share about this article, and it is very possible that I totally missed the boat with it, but that is okay….I’ll save my main voice for the Tate v Lindemann showdown.

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The article by Booth describes what the author calls “LITCOMP” classes. I didn’t gather that Booth believes Literature and Composition have zero place together in the classroom, but it feels like he takes issue with educators who lie to their employers and students. Booth writes, “...I would make three simple claims about what we do when we fail to teach beginning students, or when we agree to teach them only ‘lit’ and not ‘comp.’ First we cheat those who hire us not knowing what we really stand for. Second we help to ensure that our departments (and of course our own classes) will inherit the least interesting students from the entering classes; what students find in that first year will be what they believe about the study of ‘English’” (p. 58). I read this as a condemnation of educators who tell employers and students they will be studying composition, but instead the focus more on literature than composition.

The article takes a shift to focus on the teaching of rhetoric within the composition classroom through the use of, well, literature. (I don’t consider this to be the literature described by Tate in his articles.) Booth discusses using Senator Ted Kennedy’s 1980 DNC speech as a starting point in his course to show how a person can “remake” themselves. He goes on to describe using other pieces of literature to help frame the coursework. The most interesting line to me in the entire article is “Perhaps it is by now obvious that in dealing with such matters it is impossible to distinguish what one does as a teacher of writing and as a teacher of literature” (p. 67). I definitely agree with Booth’s sentiment here: It is is more than difficult to separate the teaching of composition from the teaching of literature. The course Booth describes falls more into the line of teaching about rhetoric, but he teaches the course using literature and composition techniques to teach students how to become better writers.

Overall, this entire debate between literature and composition (and their use hand-in-hand) in a composition classroom comes down to one very basic issue: How does one define literature? I really don’t get many clear answers when I read these articles, but I am okay with that. I for one enjoyed reading how Booth sets up the classroom, and introduces various types of literature into the composition classroom.

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Does Literature belong in a Composition classroom? 

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Does Literature belong in a Composition classroom? 

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To begin, I want to say that I am 100% in favor of using forms of literature for the composition classroom. There are definite pitfalls that one must avoid when using literature in the composition classroom, but I digress here.

Tate (1993) begins with taking issue with the fact that literature disappeared from composition classes because, “”it was badly misused by teachers desperate to teach literature, teachers who really should not be blamed for trying to teach the one subject they knew” (p. 317). The overarching argument for Tate can be summed up in really one statement: There can’t be a revisit of the debate about literature and composition because no debate ever existed. There is a plea by Tate to really revisit this idea, and educators need to think about why they are “neglecting literature” as a whole in the composition classroom. It is is hope to no deprive his students of high quality literature that can be discovered in the classroom.

Lindemann (1993) on the other hand strongly believes that literature has no place in the composition classroom. It seems as if she is arguing that a literature based course is the place where a student should learn how to write about literature. (That is a bad example based on the following line of text from Lindemann’s article.) “First literature-based courses, even most-essay based courses, focus on consuming texts, not producing them. The teacher talks 75 to 80 percent of the time” ( p. 313). First, this would be a depressing class to be in listening to the teacher drone on for a vast majority of the time, but I again am getting way off base. In my literature based courses as an undergraduate student, our classes were about consuming texts...that much is true. I also had many professors who forced us to remove our rose colored  glasses and defend our interpretations of novels, short stories, and poetry we read in the course. Having said that, I believe Lindemann would be okay with that...in a literature course. For her, the students should be writing more in the Composition classroom...not reading literature.

This mini-debate between Tate and Lindemann was absolutely fascinating to read. I loved reading their differing perspectives on this topic of should literature be in the composition classroom. I truly believe that a form of literature should be involved in every classroom...but that is just me personally. I really don’t know if there is that “perfect” answer to this discussion, but I will say that I do use literature in all of my classes, and I do not intend on stopping...

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This article felt more like an apology to me than anything else simply because Tate apologizes for a basic error. Tate reveals that he generalized the literature and composition debate as a national trend. He also stated that the issue is not that literature has totally been abandoned by composition teachers, it has just disappeared from the discussion.
What Kate points out is the absolute truth: we have always viewed lit and comp as going hand in hand. If the right teacher comes along and can "marry" these two disciplines together for their students, does that make them wrong?