Tom Liam Lynch :: New Literacies, New Literatures

I’ve been continuing to develop my dissertation study about teaching English in online environments.  I begin the study by telling the story of Boss Tweed and how he had certain textbooks tossed out of NYC schools in 1871.  The textbooks were all published by Harper’s Brothers, whose popular Harper’s Weekly featured the political cartoonist Thomas Nast.  Nast had some nasty things to say about Tweed and Tweed sought his revenge through Harper’s.

At the time, Harper’s published a textbook on English composition, from which I’ve lifted the excerpt below.  To see more of the original publication, click here.  Otherwise, here’s how composition was taught in NYC back in the day:

You can submit a sample of your writing to this new web site and it will tell you what author you write like.  No joke.  Huffington Post wrote about it recently:

For anyone who has ever thought Charles Dickens was lurking inside his or her prose, a new website claims it can find your inner author.

The recently launched I Write Like has one simple gimmick: You paste a few paragraphs that exemplify your writing, then click “analyze” and – poof! – you get a badge telling you that you write like Stephen King or Ernest Hemingway or Chuck Palahniuk.

The site’s traffic has soared in recent days and its arrival has lit up the blogosphere. Gawker tried a transcript from one of the leaked Mel Gibson phone calls. The suggested author: Margaret Atwood.

The New Yorker found that an invitation to a birthday party was James Joycean. Many others were aghast to discover they wrote similarly to “The Da Vinci Code” scribe Dan Brown.

The New York Times tried putting in actual novels, such as “Moby-Dick.” Herman Melville, it turns out, writes less like himself than King, according to I Write Like.

Atwood, herself, tried the site only to discover she also apparently writes like King. “Who knew?” she tweeted.

There is a novelty to it for sure.  There is also a history to this approach to teaching writing. Education scholar Robert Scholes writes about the birth of English from classical studies.  When studying Greek and Latin texts, 19th century students studied the author’s writing so they could emulate them.  You read Cicero in order to write like him.  When English was struggling to be respected as a discipline in the early 20th century, it fell under the spell of critical essays.  To this day, exams tend to ask students to play the role of mediocre literary critic, because it somehow strikes us as more rigorous and scholarly.

My hope is that sites like IWL will rekindle our interest in what Scholes calls “writing literarily”, that is, in reading literature in order to write with literary style.  Imagine, rather than simple asking student to write a thematic essay on a short story by Hemingway, we asked students to also write like the author.  Students would have to have a sophisticated literary sensibility to do so and would develop a much richer understanding of how writers write in order to influence readers.  It has been over a century now and the time has come to mend the split between literary and composition studies.  Three little words can help us get there: I Write Like…

A piece in The New Republic by Jed Perl beautifully describes the complicated relationship between writer and reader.  He is especially concerned with the effect that speedy technology is having on this relationship.  He writes:

…the speed with which words, once written, are now being read—a speed shaped by technological innovations long before the Internet turned the quick turnaround into the virtually instantaneous turnaround—has set me to thinking about the extent to which writing, for the writer, ought to have a freestanding value, a value apart from the reader.

Writers’ Right to Remain Silent

He starts to tease out this idea: writers do themselves a disservice when they write in order to be read by some imagined reader.  (For the record, this is a point that conflicts with my own view on the matter. Or did, at least.)  Perl thinks that the thinking process is an intimate one, a messy one, a drippy one.  Writers make sense of things by writing and sometimes forgetting or rereading.  It’s that

most writing worth reading is the product, at least to some degree, of this extraordinarily intimate confrontation between the disorderly impressions in the writer’s mind and the more or less orderly procession of words that the writer manages to produce on the page.

Writers have a right to be left unread.  To be read is to be drawn into a relationship, a commitment, that etches one’s thoughts into some textual stone.  There is value, Perl argues, in simply writing and in NOT being read:

Nobody understands the extent to which, even for the widely acclaimed author with ready access to publication, the process of writing can sometimes necessitate a rejection or at least an avoidance of one’s own readers.

That avoidance of readers gives writers a sort of right to remain silent.  What’s more,

That silence is a part of writing—that the work of this day or this week or even this year might for good reason be withheld—is becoming harder and harder to comprehend.

Forcing Students to Publish

I agree that recently it has become a new industry to publish one’s ideas quickly and quirkily.  I say this, of course, while doing exactly that. (Have you checked my Twitter feeds or clicked on the suggested links below?!)  Still, there is something to be said here for what we do as educators as well.  Aren’t we in the business of making students publish there ideas, no matter how premature those ideas might be?

The Intimacy of Literacy

I’m thinking about this age of accountability and assessment in education when if it isn’t made public and quantified, it doesn’t count.  And yet, there is much to be gained, Perl says, in exactly that: not counting, not sharing.   What would it mean for us as educators to NOT assess students’ work until they are ready to publish it to us?  Are we, as a profession, guilty of disrespecting the intimacy of literacy?

Teaching What We Don’t Know

I’ve asked a similar question before with regard to students’ reading.  Teachers don’t know–for certain–that students read for class.  They know how well they read quizzes, perhaps, but reading itself is a private act and we only know as much as students wish to share with us.  We fight it, perhaps, or trick ourselves into thinking we “can tell” when a student reads for class.  But we don’t know.  Perhaps there’s a lesson to learn about writing too.  Perhaps writing merits its own distance and silence.  In these days of Tweets and Facebooking and blogging, making one’s ideas public is gaining uncritical acceptance.  For Perl,

But if there are risks involved in resisting the public, there are also dangers involved in running after the public. Nobody talks about those dangers anymore.

Someone should be discussing those dangers with students.  Teachers should.

I’ve responded thousands of student papers.  The pre-service teachers I’ve taught in graduate school will tell you that I have laughed out loud and mocked those who seriously claim using red pens when grading somehow affects students’ sense of self.  Apparently, I’m wrong:

A study in the European Journal of Social Psychology suggests the use of red pens may make teachers more likely to spot errors on tests and to be more critical when grading essays. “Despite teachers’ efforts to free themselves from extraneous influences while grading,” write California State University Northridge psychologist Abraham Rutchick, Tufts University psychologist Michael Slepian and Bennett Ferris of Phillips Exeter Academy, “the very act of picking up a red pen can bias their evaluations.”

If I have responded to your paper in red pen or have enjoyed a good ol’ chuckle at the expense of those who insisted the color of the ink matters, I’m sorry.

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Next Monday I’m presenting at an all day session at NCTE on publishing student work.  This page has some online resources.  If others have ideas, send them along!

A new product from Merit Software called Bookpunch seeks to automate the writing process for students.  The site walks students through the writing process, which it breaks up into: Introduction | Topic | Pre-Writing | Writing–Opening Sentence | More Pre-Writing | Writing–Body | Organizing | Writing–Closing Sentence | Revising–Overview: Style, Sentence Structure, Grammar, Proofreading | Publishing

With each completed step, the site tracks students’ progress and always has link available which offers a writing tip, but only if needed.  The pre-writing process, which asks students to write fragmented replies to prompts, remains on the screen throughout most of the composition process, which I imagine could be very helpful for students whose thinking is anything other than linear (which my own certainly is).  While the site does tend to oversimplify the writing process–it encourages short clips of writing from the student because the site itself has the grander organizational structure in mind when it gives prompts–it might well be in invaluable tool for teachers of writing, a particular module, for instance, while the teacher has various other activities in rotation.

My recommendation would be to pilot a tool like Bookpunch with a small group of one’s most struggling writers and actively engage students in how the site does and does not help them in their writing.  You could easily do a test-run of the software at the cost of $59 for four months and a license for 25 students.  While not itself a knock-out, Bookpunch might be yet another rich tool of many in the writing teacher’s bag of tricks.

A week from tomorrow begins Critical Approaches to Literature–a month-long course I teach at Teachers College that examines both critical and uncritical ways in which literature has been taught historically and currently.  It occurred to me several times recently that the "tried-and-true" way we respond to literature is in essay writing.  I think there are other ways to respond to literature that schools might experiment with.  One way is animation.  Using a site called Go Animate, I’m going to ask students to try responding to literature through animation, or at least to supplant animation for one of the written assignments.  While from the teaching perspective it will be refreshing to think about and critique students’ ideas through a different medium, I imagine creating the cartoons will bring to the surface ways of knowing that would go untapped in the usual prose. 

Teaching literature might need to downsize.  While reading an article recently about nanotechnology curriculum, I wondered what nanoliterary criticism would look like.

What if students are asked to respond to some traditional literary prompt–How does Clarissa Dalloway’s language betray her feelings for Septimus?–and add this twist to it: Please respond to the prompt with your cell phones using 140 characters or less.  Why ask students to spend 5 – 10 pages answering a question when in one thoughtfully composed paragraph will give a teacher enough to work with.  Not to mention it could be assessed more quickly.

If paper-based culture values breadth, this digital age values terseness.  Imagine working for a week crafting a single SMS response.  It might well be nothing less than poetic.

The professoriate is losing its radicals, the New York Times reported recently, and new professors are more moderate than their predecessors. The article suggests that the professors who flooded universities in the 60s and 70s were cut from a different cloth. Today’s academics are less politically motivated, more moderate, and research-minded rather than ideological. Teaching, however, has never been apolitical. Just ask Socrates.

Before the great Greek philosopher gulped down his fatal dosage of hemlock, he stood trial for corrupting the minds of the young. Having traipsed around Athens asking people difficult questions, never arriving at a certainty and always pushing deeper questioning above all else, Socrates was thought to be challenging democracy in politically turbulent times. The judicial remedy, of course: to kill him.

I use Socrates as an example because, in his story, it is moot to argue whether or not he explicitly criticized democracy. That is to say, it wasn’t what he said, but rather, his trial seems to have been about his teaching method—persistent questioning of one’s ideas. Whereas I’d like to say that pedagogy and politics be left to their respective corners, Socrates’ story suggests the two occupy a round room. In terms of Socrates’ trial and sentence, there seems little difference between pedagogy and politics.

It seems to me that healthy thinking necessarily critiques any subject matter. To think is to, as objectively as possible, learn certain content matter and then develop questions out of it. But, I might ask, what is one to do with the questions and conclusions one arrives at? If, as a professor, I study the way students have been taught to read over the course of western education, and I arrive at the conclusion that reading has been taught at the expense of oral expression, what do I do with that conclusion? Do I begin each course with pontification: “Reading, as it always has in our country, oppresses oral communication!”? Do I write on the top of my syllabus, “Reading kills the mind”? Do I campaign on campus for legislation that privileges oral communication over reading?

Hardly. As a professor, my role would be to share with my students the various arguments taking place around a specific topic or question and then to share my own perspective. My students, I hope, would then arrive at their own conclusions. In short, I argue for this: Dialectic over rhetoric. If professors present the latter while calling it the former, they perpetuate the type of sophistry that Socrates warned of, the result of which is intellectual manipulation.

This particular Times article presents the retiring professor as politically mindful and active. Professor Olneck, of the University of Wisconsin, for example, begins his syllabus for a course called Race, Ethnicity, and Inequality in American Education thus: “Schools in the United States promise equal opportunity. They have not kept that promise. In this course, we will try to find out why.” Those seem to be the words of a sophist, for they presuppose the outcome of inquiry thereby preventing students from genuinely (and safely) arriving at their own conclusions. Where is the room for true dialectic when the course begins at its own end. How will students respond to the statement, “They have not kept that promise”? Is there room for disagreement here? And if there is, how is a student going to know that?

The article later discusses the work of Gerald Graff, current MLA president and professor at University of Illinois – Chicago, who, when writing about the culture wars taking place in American universities posits the notion of “teaching the conflicts.” For Graff, the role of the professor is to present to students the various conflicts in a given field and let them decide for themselves. In later works, Clueless in Academe most notably, Graff goes on to say that professors need to model thinking for their students, especially in the form of verbal and written argument-making. Academic culture is, for Graff, one of argument. This take on academia seems to differ slightly from the recent lectures and writings of Graff’s contemporary, Stanley Fish. Fish, as I’ve noted previously, thinks that professors need to keep their political views out of the classrooms. Graff would hardly take issue with that. Fish goes on, however, as he did at a lecture a few months ago at Teachers College, to argue that the professor is the content expert in the classroom whose job is to transmit knowledge. I suggest that as long as a professor or classroom goes in with the attitude that he is the expert, his students are likely to genuflect at the altar of his expertise. A fair and genuine argument seems highly unlikely.

The Times presents the notion of a “sensibility gap” between the older generation of professors and the new. A fledgling professor, Sara Goldrick-Rab, describes how “’Senior people evaluate us for tenure and the standards they use and what we think is important are different,’ she said. They want to question values and norms; ‘we are more driven by data.’” It is the ideological older generation who demands that newer scholars “question values and norms,” whereas the younger generation seeks objective data. I caution others not to be duped by the suggestion that data necessitates objectivity. As the French thinker Jean-Francois Lyotard discussed in his Postmodern Condition, knowledge creation can be created by anyone willing to pay for it. And perhaps this is an understated and paramount point: funding.

We can talk all we want about political-activism verses data-driven research. If neither side at least acknowledges that paychecks play a part in the debate, then it’s an empty argument. I don’t think the paycheck point stunts the dialogue, but it must be at least acknowledged. This is where Socrates again serves as a model: in Apology, Socrates is described as not accepting payment for his work. Perhaps only the pauper can claim to be a pedagogue. The rest, whether they call themselves social activists or data-driven researchers, are the descendants of sophists.

I’ve become hypersensitive to a term recently that gets floated in education discussions. It seems used with lightness and universal comprehension. The word is literacy. In a recent meeting, someone asked a roomful of educators and doctoral students what literacy actually meant. No one knew. On a basic level, we agreed that it had something to do with reading and writing. This troubled me greatly. Has the term literacy come to mean so little that the relationship between reading and writing is going unscrutinized? What, after all, is the relationship between the two. Reading and writing are used in unison frequently. It seems that at the center of the current conflation of reading and writing is an age-old reductionism: that reading and writing go hand in hand—that there is a seeming causal relationship between the two. Perhaps by allowing these two separate words to be subsumed by literacy, we in education have allowed our own language to become cloudy. Let’s look at a musical example to prove a point.

As a singer, I can read music. Given a few minutes, I can scan through the musical notation after identifying the key signature and hum the song. Being able to read music, however, does not mean that I can compose music. To assume that one ability necessitates the other would be to overestimate my own skill-level and to underestimate the complexity of reading and writing music respectively. Does singing a song mean one can write a song? Hardly. Now, my analogy has its flaws and could be critiqued fairly. But at the heart of it is a simple point that is not easily ignored: reading and writing are two distinct acts and it behooves educators and researchers and theorists to pry the two of them apart.

“Of course reading and writing should be considered together,” one might argue, “because in order to write one must know how to read.”

True, but in order to read one does not need to know how to write. The two are not necessarily related. Consider these essential differences between writing and reading: students produce writing; they cannot produce reading. The prior is epistemological in nature, whereas the latter is ontological; the prior is a matter of production, whereas the latter is social/spatial; the prior is external, quantifiable, categorizeble; the latter is internal, qualitative, and ephemeral.
Historically, writing seems to have become primary, especially in the latter part of the 19th century when the values of industrialization placed value on product development. Reading began to be seen as a tool for the production of writing, rather than an end for its own sake. Here, we see a teleological treatment of reading—it is a means to a written end. But is that to say reading is purposeless unless the reader writes about the reading? This is troubling. What the reader writes about is likely not to be what was read at all. Rather, it might well be some second-rate version of the reading the student thinks the teacher wants him to have done. The clearest example of this can be seen on a state exam.

One question on a recent New York State Regents exam presented two passages. The student is asked to read an excerpt from a memoir and a poem in order to write a “unified essay about parenting as revealed in the passages.” While there is more to the prompt, including specific instructions as to how to read the texts—including showing evidence and identifying literary elements—I’m struck by the kind of reading the student is told to do here. Is this reading? My instinct is to say, No it isn’t. But perhaps that would be rash. It is a type of reading: teleological reading, perhaps. Using the modifier before the word reading could make a significant difference not only in the way educators or researchers or theorists talk about the act of reading, but it could make be revolutionary for students. I imagine other modified terms for types of reading: aesthetic reading–students reading for emotional impact or pleasure; social reading—students read for the purpose of discussing in a social-academic setting; analytical reading—students read for the purpose of unpacking the structural makeup of a text; laissez faire reading—where students are left alone to read whatever they like, however they like. In any case, students must be brought into the conversation about how they are asked to read texts in school. To neglect the conversation is to encourage dishonest readership where teacher and students go about their roles inauthentically.

It is the invisible ephemerality of the act of reading that we educators have ignored or dismissed. The result has been classroom pedagogy, methods books, and literacy research that have objectified the individual identity of student-readers in the name of knowledge production. Movements to restore the student-reader’s identity (most notably Reader Response and transaction theory) have failed precisely because they have ignored the subjective nature of readership, and the limits of pedagogy: teachers teach students, they cannot force students to be readers. Granted, they can impart and practice certain reading skills, but there comes a point where the student chooses to read or not to read: And the teacher can never know for certain. Only the student himself can choose read.

The divorce of reading and writing must be a group effort. It is a relationship so firmly established at the core of western culture, not to mention educational thought, that to pull them apart will require the ideas, musings, and practices of all involved: educators, researchers, theorists, and especially students. The reward could be great—a new epoch of learning, one of transparency and authenticity, of pleasure in schooling, of deep literary experiences that are as of yet unimaginable.