Christopher Penna

Associate Professor
-- Composition and Literature, Modern Poetry, 20th Century British Literature,
Technology and Instruction

Office: 040 Memorial Hall
Phone: (302) 831-3663
E-Mail: penna@udel.edu

Curriculum Vitae
English 324 Syllabus
English 341 Syllabus
Using Literature to Teach Composition
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C. Penna

There are fundamental differences in approach and content when teaching students about literature as an art and when teaching students effective writing and argumentation using literature as the content for that writing. For example, an introductory course in literature would at a minimum acquaint the students with basic elements of literature, such as point of view, plot, structure, setting, characterization, etc. Students would also be taught the somewhat formulaic conventions of writing about literature: the appropriate tone, the specialized vocabulary, and the aesthetic and critical preoccupations of the discipline. Writing assignments for such a course would often require the student to demonstrate the way the author's use of various literary elements achieves certain aesthetic effects; in other words, the student would explicate the relationship between form and content, and students' interpretations of the works would significantly affect their performance in the class.

In contrast, a course in composition that uses literature as its content base could conceivably ignore most of the above issues. Students in a comp course would have literature as a source of raw material which they would draw upon as they explored various strategies for effective writing and argumentation. In this course, students would practice and discuss all the things students typically discuss in comp courses: organizational and rhetorical approaches, considerations of audience, purpose, the writing process from prewriting through revision, etc. Rather than expecting the students to demonstrate their ability to explicate texts or to respond to specifically literary problems, the instructor would open up the readings in such a way as to allow the students to take this raw material and use it as the content for their own writing. Edward Corbett alludes to this distinction when he explains how The Death of a Salesman might be used in a comp class:

In order to write a paper on `Willy Loman's Failures as a Father,' students would not have to operate as
little literary critics, producing the kind of highly technical critical papers demanded of college-level English
majors; they would have to respond to the literary text simply on a layman's level--on the same level that
they would respond to an automobile accident that they had witnessed on the way home from school or to
an account of that accident in the evening newspaper. (182)

Or, Corbett might have added, the way they would respond to a reading in the typical college reader.

One of the criticisms about literature in composition courses that Erika Lindemann makes is that rather than spending time with students working on their own writing, rather than working in groups, rather than making the classroom student-centered, classes are devoted to discussing literature and literary interpretation. However, I was able to avoid these problems. Obviously, as in any class, the readings were discussed. However, by adopting Lindemann's criteria, we discussed literature in a way similar to the way non-literary readings would be discussed. That is, we looked at what was happening and at the choices the writer made. Group editing, strategies for prewriting, composing and revision, issues of audience and purpose, the rational for, and organizational techniques of, various rhetorical modes were all central to the course. Assignments included such tasks as analyzing the structure of the readings, argumentation and rebuttal, and comparison and evaluation. (See attached assignments.)

WHY LITERATURE?

The question still remains: why bother using literature as the context for teaching critical reading and writing. There are a number of theoretical arguments for using literature to teach composition (see attached reading list). Comley and Scholes question the distinction between literature and non-literature and academia and "the real world." They assert that since there is a high degree of interpenetration between these two dichotomies, writing about literature should not be dismissed as somehow not substantive or utilitarian enough. More recently, Gary Tate questions the notion of academic discourse and believes students should be taught to write beyond the disciplines rather than within them. At a more practical level, using literature in a composition class is an effective way to help GTAs see the connection between their studies and what the department asks them to teach--not to mention its potential for making teaching composition more attractive to senior faculty.

Perhaps the most tangible way of understanding the efficacy of literature in the composition classroom is to consider what students learn from objectively analyzing a piece of writing and what they then do with that knowledge. After carefully analyzing a piece of argumentative or expository writing, a student should be able to identify the following:

thesis or main point (meaning)
transitions topic sentences
supporting details
tone
setting
audience

The student may then be asked to write on a completely different topic while modeling his essay on the reading. However, with inexperienced writers there is usually a low transference of skill. Alternatively, a student may be asked to engage the readings on some level. In this case, the resultant writing frequently betrays a lack of specifics since, aside from knowing the original reading, the student usually has little no other information with which to work.

At first glance, the student who analyzes a work of literature will identify things similar to those that the student of expository writing found. Nevertheless, the student who is exposed to a work of literature has a built-in advantage, an advantage that derives, in part, from the nature of meaning in literature. Analyzing literature will enable the student to identify the following:

a sequence of events (plot)
transitions topic sentences
supporting details
tone
setting
characters
point of view

The most important difference here is that no overt thesis or main point derives from the objective analysis of a work of literature. The plot, which most students will focus on, is not the "meaning" of the story. Unlike expository or persuasive writing, literature is not fundamentally trying to prove a point, or explain a situation, or teach a process (though, of course, it may indeed do all of these things to a greater or lesser degree). Instead, our sense of its "meaning" results from the way the plot and the other elements work together. Since a "meaning" is not readily evident, the result is a more open-ended piece of writing, a collection of details which serves as the raw material for students' responses. These responses do not require outside knowledge to rescue them from mere recapitulation (as often occurs when students respond to non-literary writing). Rather they depend on the students' reacting to, and reasoning on, the given context of the work. In short there is a self-contained context, a critical mass of detail that will inform the students' own writing when assignments are related to the reading.

SPECIFICS ABOUT MY ASSIGNMENTS

I attempted to make my assignments correspond to those that other 110 sections were given in terms of both approach and rhetorical strategy. I used James Joyce’s Dubliners and Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time as readers because each book contains relatively short, self contained readings that are thematically cumulative.(See attached assignments.)

Assignment #1 required students to critically analyze the structure of a couple of stories. It required the students to see the writer's organizational approach--to see the relationship between parts and the whole--and to explain this.

Assignment #2 was a standard argumentative essay that, in Corbett's phrase, required a layman-like response to a situation that the student had read about. It addressed such issues as acknowledging and refuting opposing points of view.

Assignment #3 Required students to examine cause-effect relationships in the stories and to make an argument about these relationships.

Assignment #4 used comparison and contrast to make an evaluation and recommendation about one of the stories.

The research paper required a critical, analytic research paper. There were literary and non-literary topics, and students also had the option of proposing their own topics.

Booth, Wayne C. "`LITCOMP' Some Rhetoric Addressed to Cryptorhetoricians about a Rhetorical Solution to a Rhetorical Problem." in Composition and Literature: Bridging the Gap. Ed. Winifred Bryan horner. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983. 57-80.

Comley, Nancy R. and Robert Scholes. "Literature Composition, and the Structure of English" in Horner. 96-109.

Corbett, Edward, P. "Literature and Composition: Allies or Rivals in the Classroom?" in Horner. 168-184.

Crews, Frederick. "Composing our Differences" in Horner. 159- 167.

Lindemann, Erika. "Freshman Composition: No Place for Literature." College English 55 (1993): 311-316.

Schneider, Alison. "Bad Blood in the English Department: The Rift Between Composition and Literature. The Chronicle of Higher Education 13 February 1998. A14-15.

Tate, Gary. "A Place for Literature in Freshman Composition." College English 55 (1993): 317-321.