So that we can realize (together) the reason we are in class today, please compose a collaborative post on the following questions, based on your grid work with the Brereton excerpts:
1) (How) do your excerpts support and/or complicate the stories about texts of this era?
2) (How) are your excerpts useful for testing Carr, Carr, and Schultz's "watersheds" (pp. 202-203)?
3) If only your texts survived from this era, how would you view the teaching of writing in late 19th-century American colleges? What stories would you construct, or did you construct in your grid, that might get taken up?
4) What questions do your excerpts raise, complicate, or not take up according to how Brereton employs them in his book?
Good luck and have fun,
Tarez
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Correlation between our readings:
ReplyDeleteLounsbury proposes that literature replace composition classes as the basis for writing instruction. This debate is enacted in Mead, who counters "logical progress...the lucid conduct of a theme to its conclusion, is attainable by every student through coursese in rhetoric" (217).
Jon and Jerrell
In trying to base composition instruction on literature, an interesting tension emerges: a Brererton notes, many American (and British for that matter) literary figures did not attend university. Is the implication that "good" writing is inuitive? If that is the case, why provide any university education in writing? This is something that Lounsbury, purhaps, didn't account for.