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. 

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?

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.

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.

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. 

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...