(A few years ago I was asked to write a short piece describing the relationship between my commitment to literary theory and to the teaching of writing. The result was the following narrative, slightly modified to fit in its present place.)

Having been asked to be "timely" and consider changes in my views over the past decade, I find that to be "timely" I need more time--going back to my beginnings in college. When I was admitted to Yale as an undergraduate (in 1946), prospective freshmen were asked to choose either of two English courses for their first year: English 10, a composition course, and English 15, an introduction to literature that featured Brooks and Warren's Understanding Poetry, along with Shakespeare and fiction. I chose the writing course without hesitation, since I thought at the time that I was destined to be a "writer." My choice carried no weight, however, and I was put in a third course, English 25, a "masterpieces of English" course that was the gateway to the major in English literature. One thing leading to another, with a few deviations I have spent the rest of my life in "literature," but always with a rebellious "writer" inside me, making his presence known on various occasions.

In graduate school at Cornell in the late nineteen fifties, my fellow student Larry Dembo made it clear to me that a career in English depended upon one's ability to publish literary criticism. This writing dimension of the profession appealed to me, but I quickly discovered that, though I had some gifts as a writer, I just didn't know how to produce the kind of writing that carried critical weight. Knowing what I know now, with the clarification of my thinking provided by Michel Foucault in particular, I can see that my problem was a matter of gaining entry to a discourse that involved a certain cultural stance as well as specific rhetorical procedures. At the time, I sought blindly for models, first trying Edmund Wilson, who was not really academic enough, and then Lionel Trilling, whose lucid eloquence depended on greater learning and harder thinking than I could muster, and also upon membership in a certain New York City culture that gave his thought the stiffening and confidence that were so lacking in my own.

Fortunately, some of my teachers provided models closer to home, M. H. Abrams in particular, and W. R. Keast, who, along with his mentor R. S. Crane, who was visiting Cornell at that time, gave me some direct and necessary lessons in critical writing. Finally, near the end of my graduate career, I came upon the work of Erich Auerbach and Northrop Frye. Frye was such a powerful model that some of my early writing took the form of a clumsy pastiche of his work, verging on plagiarism in its happier moments. What I was learning from Auerbach at the same time was not a writing style but a way of analyzing prose passages that taught me something about styles in general as well as how to squeeze a short passage of text until it yielded plausible generalizations. At the same time, the amount of learning it took to write as these critics wrote was not lost upon me, and I knew only too well how far I was from that level of scholarly discipline. This left me with a severe sense of my limitations, so that I felt quite bashful about writing a critical dissertation and asked my advisors to help me find something humble and useful. The result was that they gave me the recently acquired papers of James Joyce to catalogue. This I did dutifully and with great pleasure, working two levels below ground, five days a week, from 9 to 5, for a whole year. The result was a Dissertation with almost no writing in it at all--and certainly no theory or criticism.

I mention all this ancient history by way of showing that though I had been guided into the paths of literary study, I was thinking about writing all the time. I tried to write every oral report and term paper as if it were for publication, and ultimately a surprising amount of my apprentice work found its way into print. It was my orientation as a writer, I believe, that led me into literary theory. I always took a great interest in how effects were achieved, in how texts were constructed, and how invisible generic structures exerted their power over the writer. As an undergraduate, I had learned from a great art historian, George Kubler, something about the historical patterns of stylistic change in the visual arts. Auerbach, Abrams, Crane, and Frye directed my attention toward similar processes in verbal texts. The formal qualities of writing itself--all those elements of composition that are summed up in the notion of "style," became a continuing source of interest to me.

There are two points about this history that I wish to emphasize. One is that I continued to write fiction and poetry while in graduate school, abandoning those ambitions slowly and with reluctance. Only my resolve to make writing important in my critical work enabled me to reconcile myself to this shift of energies. The other point is that my interest in theory and my interest in writing were aspects of the same concern for language and textual structures. This was why Northrop Frye was so important for a young scholar like myself. He was clearly a learned man, a theoretician, a sensitive reader, and yet his own prose was alive with energy, crackling with allusive wit: lucid, sinuous, and elegant. His range of interests extended well beyond belletristic prose. His search for a unified field theory of language, however flawed, however impossible in its goal, was an inspiration to myself and many others of my generation.

It was the inspiration of Frye and Auerbach that led Robert Kellogg and myself to attempt a combined theory and history of Western narrative in the early nineteen sixties, but even this work had a base in the classroom, emerging directly from our experiences in devising a sophomore course at the university of Virginia. The book we produced, The Nature of Narrative, attracted the attention of a young structuralist theoretician, Tzvetan Todorov, who invited me, in the late sixties, to a conference on the semiotics of narrative in Urbino, Italy. From here, one thing led to another. The structuralists who interested me at that time, such as Todorov, Greimas, Genette, and others, were all themselves committed to the study of grammar, syntax, and rhetoric, both traditional and modern. To understand their work and to contribute to their ongoing discussions meant studying the linguistics of Saussure and the blend of linguistics, poetics, and rhetoric so powerfully deployed by Roman Jakobson. All the materials for a pedagogy that connected literary theory to the practice of writing were here--but, by and large, the Europeans were far less interested in pedagogy than we North Americans were. For me, it took six years at the University of Iowa to bring pedagogical matters to the foreground of my attention.

In the late sixties--a time that forced many of us to examine the roots of our professional lives--I found that my last line of defense for my life as an English professor was that I taught reading and writing. At that time, I first saw clearly that English teachers from kindergarten to graduate school were engaged in the same process of helping students learn how to understand texts more fully and to express themselves more eloquently. I was fortunate, at Iowa, in working with people for whom teaching--and the teaching of writing in particular--was a central professional focus. I think of Jix Lloyd-Jones and Carl Klaus (an old friend from graduate school) in particular. At Iowa, in addition to the more usual literature courses, I got to devise my own courses in advanced composition (including one called "Histor and Rhetor" in which all the reading came from ancient historians, plus Aristotle's rhetoric) and to work with Lloyd-Jones as he developed a remarkable team-taught course for undergraduates called "English Semester," in which literary history was taught with an internal writing component.

In English Semester a group of 25 or 30 students registered for four courses and met with a team of three instructors for two hours a day five days a week. We read English literature from the Renaissance through the nineteenth century, and students performed bits of plays in class and wrote regularly, imitating styles of various works in prose and verse and producing interpretive essays as well. In many ways these courses (which I taught for several years) were the most successful pedagogical effort I have ever undertaken. Participants emerged with a more genuine sense of the literary history of England than most students manage to acquire from any standard set of courses for a major in English. Still, the result left me feeling a bit hollow, especially in the light of what was going on around us in the late sixties. It all seemed too belletristic, too luxurious, too disconnected from other aspects of the lives of the students who had done so well and learned so much in the course. I could not imagine the job being done better, but I wondered if it were quite the right job to be doing. From this point I date my sense that a major task for critical theory would be to rethink curricular and pedagogical practice.

Moving to Brown in the nineteen seventies, I found my first chance for experiment coming from an offer of Andries Van Dam of the Computer Science faculty to devise a humanities course that could engage the capacities of a new system he was working on, called "Hypertext" (technically, FRESS). Thinking the matter over, I came to the conclusion that the most hypertextual items in the English curriculum were poems. Working with two graduate students, Nancy R. Comley and James Catano, I tried to devise a syllabus that would use the ability of the system to display items from different parts of the data base simultaneously. The details have been published by Catano. For our purposes here, the most important result was that students using the system wrote an average of eighty typed pages (or the equivalent) during the semester--and their writing improved, without any specific attention to their prose by the instructors. The system, which ultimately made all communications available to all participants, encouraged formal and informal exchanges among students as well as between students and instructors. With peer support--and peer pressure--writing about poetry, imitating poetic forms, and thinking about language, had generated results that we long for in composition courses but too infrequently achieve.

Like the English semester experience at Iowa, the Hypertext experience at Brown contributed to my thinking about curricular and pedagogical matters. A challenge from a publisher to put our theories on the practical line, led Nancy Comley and myself to produce The Practice of Writing, a composition text using literary materials not as precious objects for exegesis but as samples of effective writing to be imitated, parodied, and responded to in other ways. The theoretical basis for this effort was a Jakobsonian sense that literary language differs from ordinary language not absolutely but only by different emphases. This also confirmed (and I think I can speak for Nancy Comley in this as well as myself) our sense that the most precious resource English Departments have is a body of texts that embody the expressive possibilities of the English language.

At this point I began to understand that we make a mistake in thinking that we in English Departments are properly responsible for all the possible kinds of writing in English. What we can teach about writing involves mainly those elements of it that are literary or rhetorical. Members of other faculties send us their students not so that we will teach them to write like social scientists or engineers but precisely so that we will teach them how to achieve the grace, clarity, and energy that we admire in literary texts. I remember discussing these matters with Kurt Vonnegut one evening in New York. He reached into his bookshelves and handed me a text book with an inscription to him by one of the editors, Walter J. Miller. In that volume, which I borrowed, I found, among other things, an interview with Othmar H. Ammann.

Miller and his fellow editor had included in their book Ammann's proposal to build what, when he built it, became the George Washington Bridge over the Hudson river. In the interview Ammann said two striking things: first, "most engineers think in terms of details. And so most engineering reports are cluttered with meaningless particulars;" and second, when asked how he had trained himself to write clear and vivid reports, "I rely on my studies of logic and literature. Logic taught me how to structure my writing. Literature gives me an understanding of the importance of style" (Miller and Saidla, 252). Throughout this exemplary textbook the editors focus on the "literary problems" faced by each writer in writing a particular response to a given situation, and the "literary techniques and devices" used to solve those problems. And the texts they offer include a number of translations from ancient engineers as well as the work of contemporaries like Ammann. Even this text book for engineers, I found, stressed the "literary" side of writing. But what did the editors--or someone like Ammann--mean by "literary"?

I was still brooding about the various notions of "literature" active in our culture when I was asked to serve on the Modern Language Association's Commission on Writing and Literature. My several years of work on this Commission had a radicalizing effect on my thought. The Commission was charged with exploring ways of reconciling the split between composition and literature in the profession. What it discovered--or, at any rate, what I discovered while serving on it--was that the culture of English Departments was structured by an invidious binary opposition between writing teachers and literary scholars that could not be improved by tinkering. Because the profession was organized by--indeed, founded upon--this distinction, it could only be undone by a deconstructive process striking at its roots. Let me try to make this more explicit. What I finally realized was that English Departments need composition as the "other" of literature in order to function as they have functioned. The useful, the practical, and even the intelligible were relegated to composition so that literature could stand as the complex embodiment of cultural ideals, based upon texts in which those ideals were so deeply imbedded as to require the deep analyses of a trained scholar. Teachers of literature became the priests and theologians of English, while teachers of composition were the nuns, barred from the priesthood, doing the shitwork of the field. This structure could be undone only by an assault on the notion of literature upon which it was founded.

What I could do about this, apart from the work of the Commission itself, was to use what I had learned from structuralist and post-structuralist theory to perform a deconstructive critique of the curriculum and pedagogy that embody the culture of "English." This effort, first deployed in Textual Power, and put into practical form in Text Book, is still my concern. Among other things, I want to make a case for the importance of literariness--and the usefulness of many texts we call "literary"--precisely by denying the special mystical privileges we have accorded to "literature." To accomplish this I am using the resources of critical theory not only to deconstruct our traditional organization but to reconstruct our efforts as students and teachers of English around the notion of "textuality." Under this sign, there is no difference between the theory of composition and the theory of literature--and there is precious little difference between theory and teaching at all, since the practice of teaching is based upon the teaching of theory, and this theory itself rests upon the shared stance of students and teachers as practitioners of reading and writing--textuality.