Newsgroups: bit.listserv.mbu-l
Date:         Fri, 11 Sep 1992 09:03:56 --500
From:         SLATIN@UTXVM.BITNET
Subject:      (Fwd: *C&CD*) Suspicion, paranoi

OK.  I dunno whether to count myself as suspicious, paranoid, or just plain
pissed, but as the lit-trained person who initiated this thread by posting
news about the proposed changes at UT Austin, may I respectfully point out
that the English Department Graduate program, whose current director is the
distinguished Americanist literary scholar Evan Carton, last year organized an
in-house conference on pedagogy to which the most significant contributors
were graduate students admitted to the English Department by a committee
consisting mostlyof litertaure faculty-- graduate students training mostly in
literature but for the most part teaching a composition course from guideliens
developed by James Kinneavy, Linda Fereira-Buckley, and other highly qualified
rhetoric and composition faculty; some of these graduate students teach in the
Department's computer classrooms under the auspices of the English
Department's Computer Research Lab; and I'm told, by people on both sides of
the lit/comp divide (I was on leave last spring so missed the conference) that
papers on the experience of teaching writing in the computer classroom were
among the best and most interesting papers at the conference.  It seems to me
that the primary divisions within our department are not those between
literature and comp, at least not any more, but rather those between people
with commitments to various theoretical explorations and emphases on the one
hand, and, on the other, people who are for the most part distrustful of
theory.  Of course there are literature faculty who denigrate composition,
denying that it constitutes a legitimate field of inquiry and refusing to
acknowledge that its research questions and methodologies constitute questions
and methodologies that anyone in his or her right mind would be interested in;
but this is certainly not a universal condition-- and there are also
composition people (fortunately not many at UT though there are evidently a
few on this list) who regard the concerns of people in literature as so much
airy crap (if indeed one can imagine such a thing as "airy crap," not too
difficult if one reads much bureaucratic prose...).  Neither position is
helpful, dammit.  Anyone who thinks the literature faculty is in a position of
"power" with respect to anything but the position of composition faculty needs
his or her CPU examined.

End of flame.  I think we need each other, folks; I think we *do* have common
interests and common concerns; I think the theories driving much literary
investigation are important issues for writing instruction as well, and I do
mean *instruction*, practical, day to day, nitty gritty classroom stuff about
lesson plans and so on; and I think the theoretical and practical concerns
driving research and instruction in composition and rhetoric are also vital
for literature.I do not accept the proposition that literature is irrelevant
to us or to our students or to the concerns of the larger polity; I do accept
the proposition that those of us charged with perpetuating the perception of
relevance have for the most part done an abominable job.  But how successful
has composition been in, for instance, changing the public perception of the
writing teacher as someone who functions primarily as a member of the Grammar
Police, always concerned with proper placement of commas and preventing
anything from dangling in an unsightly manner?  What happens if you meet
someone on a plane who asks what you do, and you reply, "Oh, I'm a writing
instructor"?

John Slatin
UT Austin
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