Teaching Writing in College Panel
“Using Literature in the Composition Classroom”
Session Chair: Karley
Adney
Northern
Paper 1: “The Things They Carried Are Not Necessarily the Things They
Need”: Teaching Tim O’Brien in the
Composition Classroom.
Ann V. Bliss
Associate in English
The quote in the title of this paper comes from one of my students’ written responses to reading “The Things They Carried” in my freshman
composition class. At UC Davis, one of the classes that fulfills the lower division composition requirement is also an introductory literature class.
In this class the usual skills of the composition class—thesis development, argument, sentence structure—are taught alongside skills of literary
analysis of the short story, poetry and drama, making this a challenging class to teach. I have taught this class a number of times, organizing it
either by literary genre or by theme. In both cases, Tim O’Brien’s short story “The Things They Carried” has been one of the texts with which
students enthusiastically engage on a number of intellectual levels. In this paper I will show how using “The Things They Carried” in the
composition classroom promotes both writing and analytic skills, and prompts classroom discussion.
Because O’Brien’s
short story is complex, it challenges students to reconsider what they know
about plot structure, point of view and character development. In addition, students spontaneously make comparisons
between the representation of the Vietnam War and the current conflict in
extending classroom discussion beyond the text and providing the possibility for a historicist approach to analyzing literature. Most importantly,
though, close reading of this short story promotes critical thinking, a vital skill in both writing and literature classes. For example, one student
noted how the lack of quotation marks around dialogue “portrays the confusion of war since it is hard at times to determine who is speaking,”
while another argued that each tangible object that the characters carried signifies some greater emotional burden. This story engages my students,
none of whom are intending to major in English, in a way few other texts do and allows for multiple pedagogical approaches whose benefits reach
beyond the English classroom.
Paper 2: The Melting Pot: Utilitarian
Composition and Rhetorics in the Composition
Classroom
Louis Slimak
louis@uakron.edu
Master’s Candidate, Department of
English,
My paper considers that as American higher education becomes increasingly utilitarian, with many degrees acting more as guarantee of training
received than as a symbol of education, required courses with cross-disciplinary utility, such as composition, need to evolve and adapt in order to best
serve all of their students’ diverse needs. The composition classroom is indeed the university melting pot, the meeting ground of high and low culture,
and everything in-between. From medical doctors to English majors, and engineers to business majors, the need for competent expression in writing is
universal. What is different, then, is the type of composition necessary for each student.
Literature is the highest form of one, but only one, type of writing; that is, creative. And while this mode of expression must be taught, therefore
more than justifying the use of bringing certain pieces of literature into the classroom, it should not be taught to the exclusion of other modes of writing;
technical writing for engineers, appropriate business communications, etc. The focus of my paper is on what types of literature are of the most use to
the widest range of students; novels specifically like Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried, which explicitly use metafiction to address the nature of
fiction, and creative writing, but are also accessible and entertaining in content. Works like O’Brien’s serve as an easy springboard into the utility of
creative composition and rhetorics outside of the literary world – they can provide an instructor with easy demonstrations for why a doctor, engineer,
etc., may eventually need to find creative outlets to express themselves within their own fields.
Paper 3: Literature
in the College Composition Classroom: Pleasure, Community, Process, Efficacy
Benjamin Vogt
Department of English
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
enfrancais@att.net
Every composition course should use literature of all genres as source texts. The reasons are threefold: 1) it develops the idea of English class as
exciting and relevant if you read written material that is interesting, pleasurable, different, and challenging; 2) it exposes students to good writing—
and not so good—so that they can see and hear how it works, and emulate successful strategies that both simply rub off on them and that are
discussed as part of lesson plans; 3) teaches openness and experimentation as students work to find their own voices in putting complex thought
into efficient, focused, and socially-relevant prose.
In a recent semester-long course I used the following primary texts—along with other unmentioned secondary texts—in this order: Ted Kooser –
Delights and Shadows (poetry—rural / midwest); Scott Russell Sanders – Staying Put: Making a Home in a Restless World (nonfiction memoir/ environmentalism); Tim O’Brien – The Things They Carried (meta fiction—Vietnam war); Dorothy Allison – Two or Three Things I Know For Sure
(memoir / performance piece—GLBTA and family abuse issues); Floyd Skloot – In the Shadow of Memory (memoir—disease / aging / U.S.
healthcare).
All of these texts are linked to the idea of empowering the self, and consequently others, by baring witness to personal and public narratives that
affect and define us all. Writing is communication and conversation first, art and artifice second—something college students have not yet been led
through or shown. Each text also develops into key lesson plans: from the idea of focus, detail, and specificity, to use of description as support and
focus, then on to employing research just as you do description and integrating it into the text, and finally to developing an efficient and convincing
argument that ends in a thought-provoking conclusion.
I propose to discuss a few specific lesson plans based on texts, to address student comments on the success—and difficulty—of being in a
literature-based composition course, and to propose that using literature re-instills the importance, pleasure, and social / cultural relevance of
reading and writing in an electronically-driven society—which can often cause us to be quite alone and distanced from one another.
Paper 4: “
Dr. Patti J. Kurtz
Assistant Professor, English
In his composition textbook, The Writer’s Way, author Jack Rawlins discusses the concept of “reading for the craft.” Here, Rawlins says:
“To write you must read the way the dancer watches dance and the director watches movies: for the craft, not merely to experience the effect
of the art, but to see how the effect is wrought.” (Rawlins, 5, emphasis in original). The concept of reading for the craft forms the basis of not
only an argument for using literature in the composition classroom, but also suggests possible strategies for ways to call writers’ attention to the
craft of what they read, so that they can better make the connection between their reading and their writing.
Too often, writing instructors expose students to writing because we believe in the reading/writing connection, and assume our students will “get it”
by simply reading essays that we feel will serve as models for our students’ own writing. But most times, beginning writers read only for the
experience (if they read at all). To encourage student writers to read for craft, we must not only encourage them to read various texts, we must
provide them with exercises and tools that show them how to read for craft.
Because the end production of a composition class tends to be an essay, teachers might think that having students read poetry, stories or drama
would be a distraction and would not teach them to “read for craft.” However, I would argue that all genres of writing contain elements of craft
that students can borrow and apply to their writing, even if that is primarily expository essays. By consciously reading for craft, students can learn
how to adapt their style for certain audiences, how to add a touch of their own voice or style to their writing, and how to open and conclude an
essay or narrative, to name a few things. But most important of all, students learn that writing is about making choices and they can see the
effects their choices as writers can have on their readers, which in turn makes them better writers.
My presentation will present a brief rationale for using literature in the composition classroom, but my main focus will be interactive. I will
demonstrate various strategies and activities that instructors can use to encourage students to read for craft and then to use what they learn in their
own writing. I will also present samples of responses to those activities from my own students. In this way, I hope to not only show that literature
can play a valid role in the composition classroom, but also provide teachers with some tools and strategies for using literature to help their students
become better and more self aware writers in any genre.