Intertexts

Reading Pedagogy in College Writing Classrooms

Marguerite Helmers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2003
• ISBN:
  9781135634704
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

What do we mean when we talk about reading? What does it mean to "teach reading?" What place does reading have in the college writing classroom? Intertexts: Reading Pedagogy in College Writing Classrooms theoretically and practically situates the teaching of reading as a common pedagogical practice in the college writing classroom. As a whole, the book argues for rethinking the separation of reading and writing within the first-year writing classroom--for an expanded notion of reading that is based on finding and creating meaning from a variety of symbolic forms, not just print-based texts but also other forms, such as Web sites and visual images. The chapter authors represent a range of cultural, personal, and rhetorical perspectives, including cultural studies, classical rhetoric, visual rhetoric, electronic literacy, reader response theory, creative writing, and critical theories of literature and literary criticism. This volume, an important contribution to composition studies, is essential reading for researchers, instructors, writing program administrators, and students involved in college writing instruction and literature.

THEORY

Albert Joseph Moore, A Reader, © Manchester City Art Galleries

4
The Master Double Frame and Other Lessons from Classical Education

Nancy L.Christiansen

“Classical education” is “Hellenistic education,” H.I.Marrou reminds us in his renowned Education in Antiquity (95). In the generation after Aristotle and Alexander the Great, when education became standardized throughout the Greek world, rhetoric held center place in the curriculum. Founded not on Plato’s, but on Isocrates’s educational program,¹ primary and secondary schools prepared scholars in civilized practices through literary and language-arts-based instruction. Marrou says of this curriculum, “The primary fact is that ever since the time of Isocrates and the Sophists, and in spite of all the political and social revolutions that had taken place, eloquence had been the main cultural objective, the crown and completion of any liberal education worthy of the name” (196). This curriculum remained in place in those parts of the world influenced by Greek civilization until well into the Middle Ages. Roman educators merely adopted and added onto the Hellenistic curriculum, making it suitable for Roman circumstances. This Greco-Roman tradition is best described by Quintilian, the great Roman schoolmaster, who in the four-volume Institutio Oratoria details what had been for almost two centuries the education of a youth from birth to manhood. Donald A.Russell has explained why we can look to Quintilian for an account of this system:

The conservatism of rhetorical teaching over such a long period makes it possible to give an account of it as a system, based on the late textbooks which survive, without feeling that one’s conclusions are likely to be fundamentally wrong for the earlier period. Quintilian is undoubtedly the best guide. (25)

It was then the rediscovery of the complete text of Quintilitan that significantly influenced the curricular reform of the humanists, whose reinstantiation of this system helped to usher in the Renaissance throughout Western Europe and preserved Greco-Roman foundations for Western education until the mid-eighteenth century.

Any discussion of what it means to read, what relations inhere between reading and writing, literature and composition, “the word and the world,”² and how reading and writing should be taught must consider how these questions can be answered from this tradition that not only invented the language arts, but also influenced the literary achievements of Western civilization for at least two millenia. The longevity of the tradition—the fact that numerous educators from diverse cultures and time periods found value in its precepts and methods—also invites a consideration of whether those precepts and methods continue to hold value today.

THE CLASSICAL LANGUAGE-ARTS CURRICULUM

Reading—the analysis and criticism of texts—held a central place, alongside writing and speaking, in this curriculum. The goal of this curriculum was facilitas, or eloquence, which included the ability to speak extemporaneously and appropriately on any subject to any audience on any occasion and the ability to hit upon the right solution when making decisions in the complexity of human affairs. In a world where human knowledge, because a construct, remains less than certain, but where decisions still must be made, facilitas was the mark of the genuinely cultivated human. In order to develop this ability in both fluency and judgment, pupils engaged in reading, writing, and speaking activities, which together taught both reason and speech. Quintilian explains not only the natural reciprocity among these activities, but also their utter inseparability:

[Writing, reading and speaking] are so intimately and inseparably connected, that if one of them be neglected, we shall but waste the labour which we have devoted to the others. For eloquence will never attain to its full development or robust health, unless it acquires strength by frequent practice in writing, while such practice without the models supplied by reading will be like a ship drifting aimlessly without a steersman. Again, he who knows what he ought to say and how he should say it, will be like a miser brooding over his hoarded treasure, unless he has the weapons of his eloquence ready for battle and prepared to deal with every emergency. (X.i.1–3)

Activities in these three skills were integrated into a uniform method of study known as Imitation. The steps of Imitation, applicable to both elementary and advanced exercises, were as follows for the pupils once they knew the rudiments of reading and writing.

Reading Aloud

The chosen text is introduced to the students through an oral performance. Either the schoolmaster or a more advanced student gives this reading. The focus here is on not only enunciation, but also pronunciation (delivery)—that is, the proper use of voice and gesture. Quintilian advises:

In this connexion there is much that can only be taught in actual practice, as for instance when the boy should take breath, at what point he should introduce a pause into a line, where the sense ends or begins, when the voice should be raised or lowered, what modulation should be given to each phrase, and when he should increase or slacken speed, or speak with greater or less energy. In this portion of my work I will give but one golden rule: to do all these things, he must understand what he reads. (I.viii.1–2)

The understanding required in order to decide on the proper voice and gesture involves an interpretation not only of subject matter, but also of the author’s motives, attitudes, passions, strategies, and judgment—in short, “the character of the speaker” (XI.iii.62, 66, 150–81). Gaining this understanding requires locating texts not in print, but in performance, and seeing texts as purposeful “acts” before hearers in a certain place, time, and social situation. It also assumes these acts have meaning and that text is fundamentally behavior, mental and social. A complete reading requires interpreting not only the main ideas expressed in the words or signs, but also all the meanings expressed by the performance. It requires returning the text to life—seeing, hearing, and enacting the words or signs as the expression of a character in a drama.

The texts chosen came from all the genres: poetry, drama, myth, history, philosophy, epistle, oratory. Quintilian asserts, “[E]very kind of writer must be carefully studied” (I.iv.4).³ The implication that follows is that all texts, no matter the genre, are authorial performances reflecting character. The texts were chosen to suit the student’s age, theme assignment, and precepts being taught.

Analysis of Text

Either the grammaticus (teacher of literature, elementary level) or the rhetor (teacher of oratory, advanced level) takes students through a close analysis of the chosen passage, pointing out not only the main ideas, but also the authorial decisions, both macro and micro, pertaining to the principles the students are to learn and apply. In this step, the teaching of precept is combined with the modeling of precept. These precepts derive from the practice of the experts and describe “nature.” These meta-cognitive principles have been identified in order to teach the processes and bring them under conscious control. Under the grammaticus, the focus remains on grammar, style, usage, etymology, orthography, meter, rhythm, and narrative. Under the rhetor, logic and rhetoric receive greatest attention.⁴ In pointing out authorial decisions, the master also evaluates their effectiveness, and though being thorough, shows good judgment himself by not becoming “encumbered with superfluous detail” (I.viii.18). When the students are ready, the teacher is to help increase their judgment by presenting them with faulty examples alongside the good (II.v.10) and by leading the students through the critical process by means of questions until they can proceed independently: “For what else is our object in teaching, save that our pupils should not always require to be taught?” (II.v.13–14).

James J.Murphy has observed that this reading method “is the beginning of the application of judgment. […] The immediate intent is to show the students how the author made good or bad choices in wording, in organization, in the use of figures, and the like: the long-range objective is to accustom the student to what today we could call a ‘close reading’ of texts” (46). Indeed, students learned that reading involved both comprehension and evaluation and that both required an attention to detail, to the whole, and to the context. In focusing the reader’s attention on the decisions the text’s author made and on the meaning and quality of those decisions, this analytical approach focuses the reader’s attention on the author’s judgment or artistry with the purpose of developing the reader’s judgment or artistry, a judgment that will show up in the writing and speaking of the reader.

Memorization of the Good Models

Since the objective is to have not only words, expressions, and quotations, but thought patterns, subjects, and procedures ready for extemporaneous use, memorization is a necessary component of language learning. In addition, memorization provides, according to Quintilian, “an intimate acquaintance with the best writings” and will enable students to “carry their models with them and unconsciously reproduce the style of the speech which has been impressed upon the memory” (II.vii.3–4).

Transformation of Models

After analysis, the students move to writing activities that require various manipulations of the model text. These writing exercises involve translation, paraphrase, metaphrase, and imitation proper and are practiced in conjunction with the progymnasmata (preliminary exercises), the gymnasmata (exercises), and real-life declamations. These rewritings of models depend upon textual interpretation and reveal revisions to be interpretations. These activities teach the kind of “athletic reading” Marcel Cornis-Pope and Ann Woodlief also argue for (chap. 7, this volume), the metaphor itself coming from the Greek.⁵

The progymnasmata were a graded sequence of fourteen themes providing practice in reading/writing both narrative and expository genres and the various parts of a declamation. In the elementary years, the student usually practices writing the first four themes: the fable, the tale, the chreia (elaboration of a famous person’s speech or action), and the proverb (elaboration of a maxim), although not necessarily in this order. As the student advances, he progresses through the remaining exercises: the confirmation, refutation, commonplace (denunciation for punishment), encomium (praise), vituperation, comparison, impersonation (speech-incharacter), description, thesis (defense of general question), and legislation (praise or denunciation of a law).⁶ He also repeats all these exercises in varying order, transforming them in more complex ways.⁷ When ready, the student advances to the gymnasmata or mock-declamations, of which there were two: the suasoria (advice to a specific person for a particular course of action) and the controversia (a plea either in defense or prosecution of a person or idea). Although based on possible-life scenarios, these expository speeches were fictional.⁸ Finally, the budding orator witnesses and judges declamations actually delivered in law courts (judicial), in advisory situations (deliberative), or on ceremonial occasions (epideictic), and then prepares his own. The master provides the model texts for the younger students; the more advanced choose their own.

Translation. The Roman system, because founded on both Greek and Latin literature, of necessity required bilingual training. Hence, one method for learning involved translating a Greek passage into Latin or vice versa. Students must recapture as closely as possible the explicit and implicit meanings of the original. Besides requiring close reading, translation awakens students to the transferability of general artistic principles and meanings, but the nontransferability of particular signs, structures, and nuances.

Paraphrase. In this exercise, the pupil must rephrase the original, capturing the same ideas but expressing them in either fewer or more words. The pupil may work with a sentence, a passage, or an entire work. The pupil’s purpose, however, as Quintilian explains, is always “to rival and vie with the original in the expression of the same thoughts” (X.v.5). This exercise teaches the reader to find the main idea, but also to appreciate the changing nuances expressed as she recasts the idea. In addition, Quintilian explains that “there is no better way of acquiring a thorough understanding of the greatest authors. For, instead of hurriedly running a careless eye over their writings, we handle each separate phrase and are forced to give it close examination” (X.v.8). This exercise also teaches the writer that there are many ways to express a thought, but that “brevity and copiousness each have their own peculiar grace, the merits of metaphor are one thing and of literalness another, and, while direct expression is most effective in one case, in another the best result is gained by a use of figures” (X.v.8). Furthermore, this exercise develops copia, as Erasmus so aptly demonstrates by turning one sentence into one hundred and forty-five restatements in his Renaissance school textbook, De Copia (348–54).

Metaphrase. This variation, so named by the Renaissance school-master Roger Ascham in The Scholemaster (243), requires the student to turn prose into verse or verse into prose, or to shift from one meter to another. This exercise Quintilian treats as a kind of paraphrase (X.v.4) and John Brinsley, another Renaissance schoolmaster, treats as a kind of translation (193), suggesting its close affiliation with the exercises preceding. This exercise certainly blurs the boundaries between prose and poetic genres, suggesting that meter and rhythm become one of the most significant distinguishing features between the two, a conclusion Cicero explicitly expresses in De Oratore:

The truth is that the poet is a very near kinsman of the orator, rather more heavily fettered as regards rhythm, but with ampler freedom in his choice of words, while in the use of many sorts of ornament he is his ally and almost his counterpart; in one respect at all events something like identity exists, since he sets no boundaries or limits to his claims, such as would prevent him from ranging whither he will with the same freedom and license as the other. (I.xvi.70–1)

Students would not only have to interpret the poem or prose in order to recast it, but also consider the new constraints of occasion for the new genre. The student would also practice a variety of styles and would come to understand the different meanings of those styles.

Imitation Proper. The student produces a full-length text of his own by adding to, subtracting from, substituting, or altering the model’s content or form or both. Guidelines for such transformations of fables or tales, for example, include adding or subtracting descriptions, speeches for the characters, other narrative illustrations from history or myth, an explication, or praise of the author; moving the moral from the end to the beginning or retelling the tale by starting in the middle or at the end; or changing place, character, time, thing done, the manner of doing, or the cause. The pupil also may confirm or refute the tale. To rewrite a chreia or a thesis, a pupil would add or subtract new proofs, analogies, testimonies, precedents, praise or criticism of the first author, figures of speech, exempla, and so forth; choose a new subject and invent proofs that matched the kinds given in the model; or rearrange the order, change the style, or possibly transform the expository form into a literary form—one that enacts the argument as a debate between characters.

Such practice makes students aware of the many features of discourse and provides them a rich repertoire of discursive choices. Stored in their mental cornucopia would be ready-made elements that could be imported whole into new discourses, but also heuristics for finding proofs, methods for developing the parts of any speech (exordium, narration, proposition/division, confirmations, refutations, peroratio...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Culture
• Theory
• Classroom
• Afterword
• Contributors