Task representation in writing about literature

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Poetics 16 (1987) 131-154 North-Holland

TASK REPRESENTATION Kathleen

MCCORMICK

IN WRITING

ABOUT

LITERATURE

*

When asked to write, novices and experts alike define their tasks differently. This paper presents an extensive menu of strategies and goals for reading and writing about literature, and analyzes their various costs and benefits. It contrasts three kinds of non-interactive task definitions, either text- or reader-based, with three types of interactive task definitions that show how students may come to take account of the complex cognitive and cultural influences on reading and writing.

1. Introduction When asked to write, people inevitably construct their reading and writing tasks differently - however hazily, and with whatever representations they make, they determine the goals and strategies that define the problem they are trying to solve or the task they will undertake (Flower (in prep.) and Flower and Hayes (1980)). In fact, when we examine students’ models for writing, we discover that many of them are counterproductive to the students’ and their teachers’ goals. Many students, for example, because they so frequently have found themselves in simple information-transfer situations (Richardson (1983)) feel most comfortable writing summaries, even though they are capable of more sophisticated and critical thinking. Further, students often fail to articulate or even develop explicit positions of their own because they believe in the subject/object paradigm and fear that their own position will be regarded as ‘subjective’ whereas that of the teacher or critic is ‘objective’ (see McCormick (in prep.)). The research on which this paper reports is designed to make students and teachers aware of the strengths and weaknesses of diverse reading strategies and writing goals. I present an extensive menu of strategies and goals that can help students recognize more of the options available to them whenever they are reading a text and preparing to write on it. The paper will contrast three types of non-interactive ways of writing, either text-based or reader-based, with three types of interactive writing that progressively require students to take increasing account of the complex cognitive and cultural factors influenc* Author’s address: K. McCormick, Dept. of English, College of Humanities Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213-3890, USA.

0304-422X/87/$3.50

0 1987, Elsevier Science Publishers

B.V. (North-Holland)

and Social Sciences,

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ing their reading and writing about literary texts. The need to recognize cultural influences on reading and writing has been articulated by such post-structuralist literary theorists as Terry Eagleton, Michel Foucault, and Louis Althusser. I will argue, in contrast to ‘subjective’ literary critics like David Bleich, that a directed response statement assignment is the most useful way to encourage students to read and write in an interactive manner. Further I will suggest that it is only when students become self-conscious about the cognitive and cultural factors influencing their responses to texts that they will use the reading and writing situation as a learning situation and begin to gain expertise in critical thinking and confidence in themselves as having something interesting to say. My intention is, therefore, to apply a number of insights of contemporary literary theory to issues raised by writing and reading researchers.

2. A reading and writing assignment on Robert Lowell’s ‘Skunk Hour’ Students were asked to read ‘Skunk Hour’ by Robert Lowell and to write two or three paragraphs about it. For two reasons they are initially not given any explicit instructions: so they can see how they define their own task if one isn’t specifically given to them; and so they can discover some ways in which their task definition differs from that of many of their classmates and learn how their repertoires of strategies can be expanded. The text of the poem follows. Skunk Hour (For Elizabeth Bishop)

Nautilus Island’s hermit heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage; her sheep still graze about the sea. Her son’s a bishop. Her farmer is first selectman in our village, she’s in her dotage. Thirsting for the hierarchic privacy of Queen Victoria’s century, she buys up all the eyesores facing her shore, and lets them fall. The season’s ill we’ve lost our summer millionaire, who seemed to leap from an L.L. Bean catalogue. His nine-knot yawl was auctioned off to lobstermen. A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.

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And now our fairy decorator brightens his shop for fall, his fishnet’s filled with orange cork, orange, his cobbler’s bench and awl, there is no money in his work, he’d rather marry. One dark night, my Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull, I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down, they lay together, hull to hull, where the graveyard shelves on the town.. . My mind’s not right. A car radio bleats, “Love, 0 careless Love.. . .” I hear my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell, as if my hand were at its throat.. . . I myself am hell; nobody’s here only skunks, that search

in the moonlight for a bite to eat. They march on their soles up Main Street: white stripes, moonstruck eyes’ red fire under the chalk-dry and spar spire of the Trinitarian Church. I stand on top of our black steps and breathe the rich air a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage She jabs her wedge head in a cup of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail, and will not scare.

pail.

3. Task definitions In this exercise students are initially asked to create their own task definitions. Our experience with students suggests that these task definitions can be loosely divided into two categories: those that are either text-based or readerbased; and those that are interactive, stressing connections between text, reader, and often larger contexts (McCormick and Waller (1987)). Given what we have learned about the constructive nature of reading and writing from reader-response theorists such as Wolfgang Iser, Stanley Fish, and Norman Holland, from post-structuralist philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Etienne Balibar, and Pierre Macherey, and from process-oriented reading and writing

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researchers such as David Bartholomae, Linda Flower, Siegfried Schmidt, Shirley Brice Heath, and Patricia Bizzell, we can see many advantages to a curricular and pedagogical context that advocates students’ adopting an interactive organizing plan. But the goal of this assignment is primarily to make students aware of their own residual strategies so that they may expand them, and discover the primary benefits and costs, the advantages and disadvantages, of adopting each task definition. Although we could develop an infinite number of task definitions, there are six for our purposes that need to be differentiated: Text-based or reader-based task definitions (1) Summarizing the text (2) Free associating about the text (3) Interpreting the text Interactive task definitions (1) Self-consciously responding to the text (2) Analyzing the response cognitively (3) Analyzing the response culturally

4. Text-based

or reader-based task definitions

4. I. Summarizing Writing a summary of a text is the most common organizing plan students have - whether the text is a play, a poem, a short story, an essay, or a film. In a summary, the goal is to reduce the text to its key points, to reproduce those points in a clear, orderly way, and to keep out, as much as possible, all additional sources of information, such as, in the case of Lowell’s poem, other poems the students may have read, knowledge about L.L. Bean and skunks, and any personal reaction to the poem. A typical summary of this poem looks much like what one of our students wrote: ‘This poem is about all the people, animals, and things this poet sees and thinks about on Nautilus Island one particular Fall. He looks over the falling down houses of a rich old woman. He comments that the local millionaire has gone home after selling his yacht because the summer is over. The town’s decorator is redoing his shop for the Fall. Then the poet is driving around and sees people “parking” and hears their car radio playing a love song and then gets really depressed because he’s alone. Then a whole pack of skunks walks right in front of him and starts getting into everybody’s garbage.’

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4.1.1. The reading strategies and writing goals of summarizing This student’s paragraph tries to be ‘faithful’ to the text. It was, its writer said, ‘objective’. The reading strategies that this student seems to be using and that most people use in reading to write a summary are: to get the ‘gist’, to read literally, to avoid ambiguities, and to avoid stating a personal opinion. This student focused almost exclusively on the events described rather than on the emotions they evoked. When asked why he did this, he said that to discuss emotions would be to involve himself with opinions and he didn’t want to express the ‘wrong’ opinion. He just wanted to stick with ‘the facts’. The major goal most students have in writing a summary is to show their reader, generally the teacher, that they read the material. Notice that this goal doesn’t encourage a student to learn very much. It presupposes an atmosphere in which the reader wants rather to prove that he or she has covered the material assigned and will get credit for doing the minimum. One student said that he is more likely to use a summary plan when he’s in a hurry and his goal is to get the assignment done quickly, when he’s confused by a text and doesn’t know what to say, or when he has an opinion but feels that for one reason or another his opinion will not be seen as relevant by the teacher. 4.1.2. Benefits and costs of summarizing The benefits and costs or advantages and disadvantages of using the summary task definition can now be set out. The first benefit is that a summary is fairly easy to do: students don’t have to come up with any original ideas or a new organizational structure because the organization of a summary generally mirrors what students perceive to be the organization of the source text. Second, it’s not risky - as our student noted, very little that one says will be ‘wrong’. Third, by avoiding the discussion of conflicts or the development of original ideas, the summary provides a quick means for students to achieve closure in their papers - closure that teachers may expect will occur only after the student has gone through multiple exploratory drafts, but which the student wants to achieve in one draft. Fourth, and most important for our purposes, a summary can help to give students a kind of general orientation to the text. But what about the costs? While a summary might be easy to write, it lacks originality, so it is not particularly interesting for someone to read. Second, it is superficial because it forces students to suppress controversial or ambiguous issues that would require expressing an opinion. Third, if a summary is all students do, it inhibits most creative or critical thinking and learning because they are discouraged from interacting with the text, or from discovering its opinions and challenging them with their own. Fourth, in fact, a summary is not really ‘objective’ at all, since inevitably the reader’s own opinions and choices enter into it.

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The summary, nonetheless, seems to be one quick and easy method for students to attain the closure teachers demand because it finally de-emphasizes the dialogue that occurs between readers and texts during the reading process. Many students, however, and I think largely because of their desire to attain closure in both reading and writing, do not see it this way. Perhaps it is simply that many are not being reinforced for developing alternative task representations. As Richard Richardson notes, many students find themselves daily in ‘information-transfer courses’ in which the teacher ‘disseminates’ (1983 : 45) information to the students and in which the students, by and large, play the role of the ‘attentive audience’ or ‘active non-participants’ (1983 : 48). The point of attending this kind of class is to take in information so that it can be given back, unedited and pretty much unreflected upon, at some later point. I am not suggesting that summarizing is not a worthwhile goal. Often readers need to construct some kind of model of what’s going on in a poem before they can analyze it more perceptively. But it is fruitless to pretend that an ‘objective’ statement of what a text is about can ever be produced. In fact, some of our students who defined their writing task as summarizing disagreed with the student quoted above about the ‘factual’ nature of his summary. Some chose to include ‘facts’ that for some reason he left out, like the decorator’s desire to marry or the poet’s assertion ‘I myself am hell’. In short, summarizing a text can be good starting point but it is always a poor stopping point. 4.2. Free associating At the other extreme from writing a summary in which they try to be objective is writing in which students try to be subjective. There are readers who simply read a text as an occasion to talk about their own ideas without any self-conscious awareness of their cultural rootedness. This approach to reading is encouraged both by expressive process models of writing and by subjective reader-response criticism. Many proponents of the process model have attempted to counter the objective model by asserting that the individual student writer is unique, and, therefore, must be allowed to express him or herself ‘freely’. Researchers such as D. Gordon Rohman (1965) and Donald Stewart (1969) advocate the use of expressive theories of writing to help students get over the fear of using their own opinions. Rohman argues that “‘good writing” must be the discovery by a responsible person of his uniqueness within his subject’ (1965 : 108). While this subjective expressive model of writing may be laudable in many respects, it can nonetheless put students in binds that are as pernicious as the traditional text-based, product-oriented, objective model. Under the expressive model, students must have integrity and be sincere, qualities that are put forth as able to be determined objectively but which in

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fact are always inferred by certain value judgements on the parts of teachers. So while students are told to ‘be themselves’, teachers still have the right to say whether or not they have been. Further, while students must rely solely on experts’ opinions in the objective information-transfer situation, under the subjective paradigm, they must rely completely on themselves. This can lead to two obvious problems: students’ drafts and papers can be loosely impressionistic, uncritical, and ‘ touchy-feely’, or they can simply be misinformed because students are not encouraged to go ‘outside their own heads’ for information. Similar situations occur in subjective uses of response statement, advocated particularly by David Bleich and Norman Holland. Response statements have been widely used in the past ten or fifteen years. David Bleich (1978) suggested using them as a way of discovering and analyzing the subjective factors - personal perceptions, associations, effects - that influence readers’ reactions to texts. The most important characteristic of his approach to teaching is the insistence that readers seek within themselves the causes of their reactions to texts. In this use of response statements, the source of meaning is in the reader’s subjectivity. A similar use of response statements has been made by Norman Holland (1973, for whom the reader is also the origin .of meaning. According to Holland, a reader’s personality profile will explain how one particular reader reads in one way, and another reader in some other way. When you analyze (or ‘read’) readers themselves, you find, Holland argues, that readers possess individual identity themes, and that when they develop interpretations, they transform the texts they read according to their identity themes, their psychological defenses, expectations, and fantasies. Such uses of response statements to analyze the reader help to explain differences in interpretations of texts; however, they, cannot explain similarities. If each reader’s response were truly ‘unique’ or purely ‘subjective’, how could readers ever agree on anything? Further, how could they even read and understand a text since a text is supposedly a product of a writer’s own subjectivity or identity theme? While students often think they will like a subjective approach to writing about their reading experiences because they think they will be able to ‘say whatever they like’, most of our students have found this approach unsatisfying because it finally encourages them to analyze only themselves, not the text, not the classroom situation, and not their larger cultural community. In short, they come to realize that the costs of free association outweigh the benefits. Further, it becomes impossible after a time to analyze the reader’s ‘subjectivity’ or personality without studying the ways in which the reader’s culture helped to form that personality. Reading is always situated historically and culturally: all readers are a part of a particular ‘reading formation’ (Bennett (1979 : 174)). Although as I have argued elsewhere response statements are one of the

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main pedagogical breakthroughs of the new literary paradigm (1985) one of the problems in using them is that teachers and students alike can regard them simply as exercises in free-associating. Here is an extract from a response statment that does this: ‘This poem reminds me of just how boring it can be go to a resort town off season. When I was a child, my parents always used to drag my brother and me to the shore in May and October. They said they liked it because there weren’t many people around, but I think it’s also because it was cheaper. None of the amusement parks were open: no rides, no cotton candy. And generally it was too cold to go swimming or get a decent tan.’

4.2. I. The reading strategies and writing goals of free-associating Notice that this last student is certainly talking about her reactions but not really her reactions to the poem. The Fall setting in the resort area was all she appears to have noticed about the poem. The rest of her response is simply her own associations. When asked about her response, she suggested that her aim was to offer a reaction that paralleled the poet’s - depression in a resort area after the summer season - and that might help to link the source of his depression to hers: boredom. Yet she got so caught up in exploring her own memories that she never got around to dealing with the poem. The most common reading strategy students employ when they read to free-associate is the springboard strategy, that is, they read as a springboard for thinking about their own experiences. While many types of reading and writing employ this strategy in combination with other strategies, free association is characterized by the exclusive use of this strategy and also by the exclusive focus on the reader. A related reading strategy that may broaden the free association to an extent is skimming to interesting points and responding. This second strategy may acknowledge the role of the text in leading the reader to a reaction, but the focus again is primarily on the reader. The major goal that students reported they had in writing free-association responses was to explore some aspect of their own experiences, but their focus was on ‘personal’ experiences rather than on their experiences reading the text. Consequently, another reading strategy students employ when free associating is to avoid analyzing the relationship between the text and their personal experiences. Generally readers who develop a free-association task representation do not have any goals for their readers. 4.2.2. Benefits and costs of free-associating One of the benefits of using free-association as a task definition is summary, it is fairly easy to write: a reader simply talks about the that pops into his or her head upon reading the text. Second, enjoyable to write because it is often fun to let one’s mind wander

that, like a first thing it can be and try to

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link various personal experiences together. Third, a free-association can be an important way for readers to begin to analyze how their general or literary repertoires intersect with those of the text (see McCormick and Waller (1987)). A reader should think about the associations developed during the reading process and certainly jot them down, but the focus of a more developed response should always be to analyze those associations, not just to present them. There are definite costs to writing a free association. Unless personal associations are explicitly linked with an analysis of the text or with a broader cultural context, they may seem rather arbitrary and irrelevant to readers. Second, free associating will likely miss much of what is going on in the text: its strategies, images, conflicts, metaphors, and so forth. Third, unless a response is itself problematized, the influence of cultural constraints upon it will be ignored. 4.3. Interpreting Interpreting the text is a much more sophisticated task definition than either of the two discussed above. Generally interpreting is the task definition for which students have been most frequently reinforced in high school and college. 4.3.1. Reading strategies and writing goals for interpreting While on the one hand, interpreting encourages writers to develop an original position, on the other, its major goal is that the reader’s originality should be disguised as a discovery of something in the text rather than as a creation of a reader interacting with a text. In the reading situation, each reader brings his or her own particular general and literary repertoire to bear on a text that has, in its turn, been written out of a particular general and literary repertoire. The traditional notion of interpreting as finding something ‘in’ the text also encourages readers to adopt the strategy of downplaying multiple meanings and unresolved ambiguities in favor of presenting an authoritative voice that appears to understand the text ‘objectively’. Finally, interpreting encourages readers to assume that the only reason they read a text is to find out ‘what it means’. But the reading experience is much more than discovering a text’s main ideas. Readers can read to discover cultural differences between their society and the one in which the text was written; readers can also read for pleasure; they can read to develop new reading strategies, and so forth. But if readers choose the traditional mode of interpreting, they generally ignore the role that either their reading strategies or their culture plays in the production of meaning and opt instead for an objective sounding discussion of the text. Because of the way most student readers have been trained, writing a text-based traditional interpretation is a very familiar task definition. Foucault

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(1981) analyzes various procedures and principles by which the ideology of a society controls and delimits discourse. Among these is the principle of rarefaction whereby one is encouraged to analyze a text, not to discover multiple and often contradictory meanings but in order to demonstrate a limited, single, unified meaning. A major procedure by which discourse is rarefied is through commentary. According to Foucault, commentary ‘allows us to say something other than the text itself, but on condition that it is this text itself which is said, and in a sense completed’ (1981 : 58). While Foucault recognizes that a commentary will always say something that the text upon which it is commenting did not say because a text cannot be reproduced objectively, he recognizes that commentary so defined ‘exorcises the chance element of discourse’ because ‘by a paradox which it always displaced but never escapes, the commentary must say for the first time what had, nonetheless, already been said, and must tirelessly repeat what had, however, never been said’. An interpretation will naturally differ from the sources it is interpreting, but its rhetorical strength lies in its supposedly faithful reproductions or reduction of those sources rather than in its deviations from them. Conceived of in this way, the default strategies for students writing an essay about something they had read are frequently to try to be as ‘true’ to the text as they can, to try to keep out as many chance elements as possible. Many students accomplish such a goal by writing a summary but some (often regarded new

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“‘Skunk Hour”, by Robert Lowell, suggests the absurdity, “illness”, and hellish nature of existence for a sensitive, self-conscious person in a world populated by “skunks”. All of the people the poet describes - the heiress, the summer millionaire, the decorator lead absurd lives, yet they are unaware of it. The heiress buys up homes, preventing other people from living in what’s probably a nice area just so she doesn’t have to put up with neighbors. The millionaire dresses absurdly like people in a catalogue just so he’ll look “right”. The decorator with no interest in his job would like to marry a woman with money so he won’t have to work. These people are, in a way, mad, like the eyes”. The people on Nautilus skunks marching up Main Street with “moonstruck Island walk around the town just as selfish and self-aborbed as the mother skunk who wants to eat that sour cream so much that she “will not scare”. But the people are worse than skunks because they could choose to be different. The skunks have to live their way to survive.’

This student has offered an interesting interpretation of the poem: that the people on Nautilus Island can be equated with skunks in their madness, selfishness, and absurdity. But however objective it looks and authoritative it

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sounds, this student materially contributed to this reading of the poem since it is certainly not the only interpretation possible, and yet she presents it as if it were. 4.3.2. Benefits and costs of interpreting The strategy of feigned objectivity, so common with traditionally-styled interpretations, has advantages: it is a powerful tool that can suggest to readers that the writer is authoritative, correct, and (if a student) should get a good grade! In fact, writing interpretations in this way has been the dominant ideal in Anglo-American pedagogy since the 1940s. But once readers realize that there can be alternative interpretations - for example that the skunks could symbolize something natural and good, and instead of being equated with the people on the Island could be read as opposed to them - then this seemingly authoritative style of writing can become constraining and can finally lose much of its authority. A reader might want to talk about the difficulty of assigning any particular meaning at all to the skunks; perhaps the poetic voice seems at times to inspire sympathy, while and at other times it seems too self-indulgent. Where is there room in the text-based interpretation task definition for these kinds of tentative reactions and ambiguous responses? Where is there room for discussing the process of discovery? The advantage, then, of writing an interpretation is that it can be very persuasive. It also is a type of writing that requires writers to have one main point - notice the way in which our student subordinated her summary of the poem to her major idea. Finally, because it does require the writer to take a distinctive position, interpretations are usually more interesting to read than summaries, and more easily communicable than personal associations. But traditional interpretations seem to have their costs as well. Interpretations require readers to suppress their own voice; hence, interpretations give little sense of the reader’s level of engagement. Did the student quoted above like the poem? Did she find it difficult to read? How did she decide to read the skunks as a metaphor in the first place? As opposed to response statements, interpretations focus on the final reading product rather than on the reading process. Traditional interpretation tasks assume that the only legitimate topic to write about is the meaning of a text and, therefore, fail to analyze the complex cognitive and cultural factors that influence the creation of meaning. Readers simply quote passages from the text as ‘evidence’ for their particular interpretation. Further, interpretation tasks require readers to suppress multiple meanings.

5. The inadequacy of the subjective/objective The kind of writing about literature classes usually focuses on developing

paradigm

traditionally taught in college literature an interpretation of a text. Sometimes it

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even seems to ask students simply to summarize. The literary text is examined for its formal, structural, or thematic characteristics, and the quality of a student’s work is usually judged by whether the points made can be verified from the text, whether all the ‘evidence’ afforded has been considered, whether the interpretation is in accordance with the apparent intention of the text or, behind the text, with the author’s intention. Sometimes such an approach will focus on ‘themes’ or ‘issues’ that are found ‘in’ the text and about which the text, or its author, is supposedly concerned. Clearly, such an approach treats the text as a stable object, and subordinates the reader’s contributions to the making of meaning to the demands of the text. The interpretation, like the summary and the free association, is based on a belief in the subjective/objective paradigm. The subjective/objective paradigm, which assumes that a person can have purely subjective knowledge, in the sense of personal and unique opinions, or purely objective knowledge, in the sense of correct or true facts about a given topic, is one that fails to see knowledge as located within a social or cultural context and fails to see that every individual writer - student or expert - is a constituent of his or her culture. I wish to suggest that the subjective/objective paradigm is a false one. Arguments and positions are always culturally and historically situated whether or not writers actively acknowledge this. Once we recognize the situatedness and interestedness of all positions and once we share this recognition with our students, they can then have an entry into types of writing from which the subjective or the objective paradigm excludes them. For example, once students discover that the positions of all writers - whether expert or student - are not based so much on ‘facts’ as on beliefs and interpretations derived ultimately from certain aspects of a broader ideology, students can begin to examine those experts’ opinions critically. Such an examination will not have as its goal to assert that the experts are right or wrong in some absolute sense, but rather to explore the ways in which students’ own ideological positioning calls into question or supports the experts’ opinions. To ask students to examine texts from a cultural viewpoint demands that they read critically and that they use their own knowledge to do so. It also demands that students recognize that their own position is not naively subjective, in the sense of idiosyncratic or unique, but that it, too, is culturally influenced, and therefore must also be exposed to critical scrutiny. But because very few students have been taught to situate themselves culturally, they cannot bypass the subjective/objective paradigm, and this paradigm essentially precludes students’ being able to develop strong positions of their own in their writing. Such ‘subjective’ or ‘objective’ writing, is therefore, not appropriate for an approach to reading that argues that meanings are not to be found ‘in’ texts, that reading is an interactive process. Moreover if, as poststructuralism suggests, texts and readers, writing and reading, alike, are the products of

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wider ideological forces than are seemingly foregrounded in the text, then traditional interpretive modes of writing are inadequate. Traditional literature teaching has quite often required students to investigate social or cultural backgrounds of literature, to bring information from, say, Elizabethan politics to bear on Shakespeare’s plays. But it is very rare to ask that readers try to account for their relations to their own age - to make the reader’s social and cultural presuppositions part of the investigation.

6. The interactive response statement I have found that the best kind of writing for the approach to reading texts I am advocating is the response statement. A response statement can be interactive if it deliberately asks readers to focus not on what is seemingly ‘in’ a text, but on their experience of reading a text. It starts not as a summary but as an informal record of a reader’s reactions to the text; it asks the reader to analyze the assumptions underlying these reactions, and to attempt to situate his or her reactions and analyses in a broader cultural context. In such a response statement, students explore the factors from both their own and the text’s general and literary repertoire that influence the process of reading. They then try to examine the implications of the assumptions they bring to their reading experiences, both for reading texts and for other areas of interpretation and action in their lives. Such an approach obviously differs from the subjective uses of response statements by David Bleich and Norman Holland outlined above. But it also differs from the more objective uses of response statements advocated by teachers such as Elizabeth Flynn (1983). Flynn employs response statements to return to a more text-centered approach to reading rather like the traditional notion of interpretation discussed above. From this perspective, the response statement is regarded as a rough first draft of a paper that will eventually explain what a text means in a well-developed interpretation. The purpose of such response statements is to provide a kind of initial free-writing experience for students so that they can comfortably and easily jot down their first impressions of a text and later refine those impressions into a coherent formal paper. According to this view, the response statement is a means to a end rather than an end in itself and that end is a rather traditional one. Although the response statement in this method becomes an important stage in the writing process, it is never used to explore or problematize the student’s own reading process. I advocate, therefore, a third use of response statements - one that is contextual, that acknowledges the importance of both reader and text, that focuses on the interactive nature of reading without necessarily privileging

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either side - and, as well, helps to account for the fact that both text and reader are situated in language, in history, and in culture. The types of response statements I use not only ask my students to react to texts, but explicitly to analyze their reactions. They do this by exploring the text’s general and literary repertoire, and their own general and literary repertoire. Sometimes I let my students write short, informal assignments; sometimes I give them much more elaborately structured ones. But in all cases I insist that they should try to understand their reading experiences in terms of the assumptions they bring to reading, and then focus on the sources of those assumptions, the processes by which they construct meaning, and the implications of the readings they construct. The result is that they become much more aware of themselves as interpreting beings, aware that humans are always in situations (and not only with literary texts) in which they have to interpret signs, symbols, codes, languages, and each other’s actions. Reading, in short, becomes seen as one of the basic activities of being human. Becoming more self-conscious and analytical about what they do when they read is thus regarded a vital part not merely of my students’ experience of reading texts but of their growth as individuals and members of society. In setting out guidelines for writing response statements, I provide my students with both general and specifically directed questions: what are the initial effects on you of reading a text? Why do you think reading the text had that effect? What influences did the text provide? What influences did the reader provide? What does your response tell you about your reading strategies? My goal throughout is to stress the interactive nature of the reading experience.

7. Interactive task definitions 7.1. Self-consciously

responding to the text

The simplest kind of interactive response statement is one in which readers self-consciously explore their reactions to a text but in which they are not certain of any particular focus or direction. This type of response statement is more focused on the reading experience than merely free associating; it is also a much more useful starting point than a summary for readers to discover ways in which to expand and deepen their reactions to a text and eventually perhaps to produce a strong reading of it (see McCormick and Waller (1987)). Here is an extract of a student’s response statement to ‘Skunk Hour’. ‘I found this poem to be very confusing. I was doing all right with the first four stanzas, but when the poet started talking about himself and then those skunks, I was lost. It’s obvious that he’s in some kind of state of despair, feeling lonely and left out of

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everything, but it doesn’t really seem that he’d want to be part of the town he described. But those skunks are what really got me - it’s so weird. He’s been doing

almost straight description the whole way through, but am I supposed to really believe there’s this pack of skunks walking up Main Street? The whole skunk part seems like it’s got to be symbolic - they even walk past a church! But I can’t figure out how to read them. The poem kind of takes me off my balance. Generally I think I know whether something should be read literally or as a symbol, but here I’m not sure.’ 7.1.1. Reading strategies and writing goals for responding to the text Notice that this student is not doing an interpretation of the poem, but neither

is he merely free-associating. His major strategies are to observe his process of reading, that is, to become self-conscious about the particular reading strategies he is using, and to pay attention to the effects of the text on him as he is reading it. His analysis at this point is still quite vague, as it generally is at this first stage of a response statement. We can already see, though, that his focus is more literary than cultural - on trying to decide how and when to read symbolically. So, in a personal conference and in class, I focused on his literary repertoire. I asked him to try to be more explicit about the literary expectations he had when coming to this poem, and about the particular expectations this poem sets up in him. Obviously, he’s concerned about his reading strategies, particularly about whether he should read the skunks literally or figuratively. He still seems to assume that there is only one correct way to read this poem, and that if he could only figure this out, he would be more comfortable. But this is my analysis rather than his. I asked him to write another response statement in which he tried to analyze his response cognitiuefy, that is, to explore in more depth, his expectations, his reading strategies, and his process of interacting with this particular text. We will look at his second response in the next section. What are some of the goals of doing this kind of basic response to the text? First, readers try to go beyond a simple free association: they record their reactions - literary and cultural - to the text. Note that the student quoted above recorded his reaction when he commented that he found the text as a whole confusing because he couldn’t decide how to interpret the skunks. Simultaneously, readers record as much as possible of their process of reading. The student quoted above focused on his reading process as well as his general reactions to the text: we can see that he feels comfortable and confident when he thinks he can read literally - that is the way he experienced the first four stanzas of the poem - and we can pinpoint where the poem began to be difficult for him. Focusing on the process of reading particular texts often leads readers, as it did this student, to generalize about their reading process and to discover some assumptions in their general or literary repertoire that could be expanded into a strong reading. In this particular response, our student is beginning to recognize his strategy of labelling a whole text as either literal or metaphorical. His focus in his next response statement, therefore, was

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to analyze his response cognitively. Other students, however, might choose to look at the poem as a statement about our society and they would then explore their cultural assumptions and the implications of them. 7.1.2. Benefits and costs of responding self-consciously to the text The benefits of writing response statements are many. First, the focus of this and all the types of response statements is more on students’ learning than on showing what they’ve learned. Discovering that they have certain cultural assumptions, certain habits of reading, certain theoretical orientations can make writing about texts much more enjoyable. Second, students decide for themselves what issues are important in their reading of a text; consequently, there can be no ‘wrong’ responses, only ones that are insufficiently developed and analyzed. This realization can help students gain confidence in their abilities as readers because they discover that they have specific opinions. This exploratory response statement, therefore, can lay the groundwork for developing a deeper cognitive or cultural analysis of particular responses to a text. There are, of course, some costs to writing response statements. Although there are no ‘wrong’ responses, a response statement can, nonetheless, be more difficult to write than a simple summary or free association. As students become more attuned to writing response statements, they can be challenged to analyze more and more deeply the factors influencing their responses to texts. This will require them to become increasingly aware of the cognitive and cultural forces that influence not only the way they read a text but the way they perceive themselves and their world. Second, response statements, unlike an interpretation, do not put closure on a text. While some students feel quite liberated that they no longer have to write essays that pretend to present definitive meanings, others can feel upset or threatened by the fact that their interpretations of a text can never be regarded as the ‘correct’ interpretation. Recognizing that dominant interpretations can and do change over time because they are culture-specific suggests that text analysis can theoretically go on for ever. Finally, although students can discuss what they feel is the meaning of a text in a response statement, the notion of interpreting the text is definitely subordinated to analyzing the process of reading it and to analyzing the cultural factors that influence that process. Again, for many students, this characteristic of response statements is not a cost; other students, however, who have been traditionally trained, find greater difficulty in adjusting their writing goals. 7.2. Analyzing

responses cognitively

What follows is an extract the last section.

from the second

response

of the student

quoted

in

‘(. .) I assume when a poet starts to speak in his own voice that the point is coming and that doesn’t seem to be the case. I’m starting to realize that maybe that’s the major

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assumption that is confusing my reading. I expect the skunks to be really significant because the poet is talking about them in the first person. Actually, the whole poem, including the skunks, is descriptive, but the textual strategy of speaking in the first person suggests to me that the description should mean something more. I think that it’s for that reason that I tried in my first response to read the skunks as symbols for something - there’s really nothing in the poem to suggest they aren’t real skunks. One of the things I’m discovering is that it isn’t the text alone that dictates how I read, but my own assumptions about text strategies and my reading strategies. I’m beginning to recognize that I could choose to read any parts of “Skunk Hour” either literally or metaphorically, and that choice could really determine the way I interpreted the poem.’ 7.2.1. Reading

This

student dictating its

strategies and writing goals for analyzing

responses cognitively

has begun to move away from suggesting that the poem is meaning to him, as he did in his first response, toward an

understanding of the various ways in which his assumptions and reading strategies influence his reading. In other words, he is beginning to show how his repertoire interacts with the poem’s. One important recognition he makes is about the force of the first person text strategy upon his own reading strategies. He assumes that the ‘I’ is going to give him the message of the poem, and he changes his reading strategies in direct response to this text strategy: he begins to read for symbols in an attempt to discover the message. But he comes to realize that because he himself has chosen to adopt this symbolic reading strategy, he can also choose to adopt other strategies that could help him read the poem in diverse ways. For example, he might have read in order to make literal/figurative distinctions, to create multiple meanings, to fill in gaps, to focus on key words in the text, to develop contradictory readings, to build consistency, to relate the text to other texts, as well as to respond in particular ways to certain textual strategies such as person, tone, mood, and meter. In any reading situation, a reader will always use some combination of reading strategies, although I have discovered that students are initially unaware that they even have reading strategies. Response statements such as this one can help students and teachers tease out what some of those strategies might be. Students learn that once they discover what their reading strategies are, their writing goal then becomes to determine what particular assumptions about certain text strategies, about the text’s subject matter, about poetry in general, and so forth, influenced their using certain reading strategies. The student quoted above, for example, discovered that he began to read symbolically after the poet started speaking in the first person because he expected that ‘the message’ of the poem would occur there. 7.2.2. Benefits and costs of analyzing responses cognitively Becoming self-conscious about cognitive processes can help to increase the pleasure of reading because it will enhance the interpretiveoptions available to

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readers: once they realize how and why they’ve read a text in a particular way, they can then choose to read it in alternative ways. They can also generalize their discoveries about their reading strategies to their reading of other texts. An increased awareness of their cognitive processes can also help readers to read more strongly because they will be able to explore various factors underlying their responses themselves. The major cost in analyzing response cognitively is that the cultural imperatives that underlie cognitive assumptions could be ignored. 7.3. Analyzing

responses

culturally

Analyzing reading strategies helps readers situate themselves cognitively in relation to the text to see how its strategies and theirs intersect. But reading is not just a mental act. Readers still need to situate themselves and the text in a broader cultural context. Writing and reading always take place within cultural contexts - they are produced by the ideology of the societies in which they occur. For example, the student quoted above placed a tremendous amount of importance on the ‘I’ of the poem. One reason he did this is because our culture places such value on the notion of the individual. Thus, this student was not just responding to a textual strategy when he chose to look for the ‘message’ of the poem in those places where the poet spoke in first person; he was responding to a whole host of cultural values that regard the individual as a unique being, as a source of subjectivity. It was only after a fair bit of research into the use of the first person in poetry and the evolution of the concept of the ‘individual’ over the past few centuries that this student began to recognize the cultural values that were helping to motivate his cognitive acts. Such analysis can help readers to become attuned to many cultural assumptions - which often seem ‘true’ and ‘natural’ rather than culturally specific - that underlie their cognitive responses to texts. At times, however, readers find themselves immediately moving into a cultural analysis. They discover that the general repertoire of the text interacts or clashes with theirs in such a way that they want immediately to explore the ideological forces underlying their responses. Look, for example, at this student’s response: ‘Generally people are attracted to rich people and repelled by skunks. This poem was interesting to me because it had the opposite effect. I was brought up by parents who, I think, would have both admired and felt suspicious of the people described in this poem. Yet the poem undermines their place on the social ladder by suggesting that they are all poor - despite their pretenses. Yet in a way it’s still hard for me to know how to react to them: should I despise or resent them because they’re phonies or admire or be jealous of them because they have things I don’t? It seems that our society is very divided in how it treats its well-to-do, and I think this poem and my reaction to it

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reflect that. On the one hand, there’s all those TV shows like Dynasty that make everyone sad because they aren’t rich, but on the other hand, the rich are actually portrayed on these shows as really mean and nasty! So we’re divided as a culture: do we admire them because they have money or hate them because they’re vicious and deceptive? Actually this poem has suggested to me a third attitude one can have toward the rich: pity because they’re placed in a role by society where they feel they have to maintain some kind of front. I think that the “I” of the poem feels all these emotions. He’s obviously alienated from these people, yet he seems to wish he had somebody to love, but he doesn’t. He says “nobody’s here”. The presence of the skunks and the poet’s reaction to them are actually what made me think of the third way of looking at the rich. The skunks, according to the poem, “will not scare”, and they’re the only ones who won’t. Everyone else in this poem is afraid. When you think about it, it’s not just the rich that feel they have roles to play; we all do. We all have our pretenses, and because our society gives us contradictory messages, like about the rich on Dynasty, we’re never sure we’re playing “the appropriate role”. This is actually a kind of scary thing to think about because you’re often told to “be yourself”, yet what does that even mean. If you were “marching up Main Street” in your town, could you really be as un-selfconscious as the family of skunks?’

7.3. I. Reading

strategies and writing goals for analyzing response culturally

Some of the reading strategies this student uses are similar to other types of writing discussed here. But in almost all instances, she employs those reading strategies in the service of different, more culturally-aware analyses. Notice that like the student using free-association, she does present some personal information, but her goals in using it are different. Her personal information is set in a context in which it relates, first, to her response to the text and, secondly, to her larger cultural analysis. This response also offers, to some extent, an interpretation of the poem that the poem suggests we should have more compassion for each other because we are struggling to play contradictory roles. Yet her strategies for developing an interpretation differ in a number of ways from those of the traditional interpretation we discussed earlier. First, she assumes that her reading is not derived solely from ‘the text’, but is rather the result of an interaction of personal, cognitive, and cultural as well as textual variables. Second, her position is much more tentative throughout than the traditional interpretation discussed above; consequently she is able to develop her position in a new direction near the end of her response, extending the notion of role-playing from the rich to society in general. Because she implicitly acknowledges that there are many ways to read this poem, she can leave more interpretive options open to herself. Third, she is reading not only to discover ‘what the poem means’ but to look at how it and her responses to it are constituted by larger cultural forces.

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In this response statement our student moves casually from one idea to another. First, she establishes a parallel between her attitude toward the rich in this poem and society’s general attitude: that it is difficult to decide whether to admire or resent the rich. Second, she suggests another possible reaction to the rich: to pity them because they are forced by society to play roles. Third, she suggests that we all have to play roles. One of the differences that can clearly be seen here between a response statement and a formal paper is that in the response statement the writer is allowed - and encouraged - to move freely from one idea to another. This student has in her response the potential for developing at least three quite different strong readings of the poem, all of which explore the interactive nature of reading and situate her response in her cultural context. 7.3.2. Benefits and costs of analyzing responses culturally One of the benefits for students of writing response statements in which they analyze their responses culturally is that they develop links between literary and non-literary texts, particularly those of popular culture. They can begin to see that all acts of perception are a kind of reading - from watching television to going to the movies to staring at billboards to reading Shakespeare. This recognition can help them to begin to ‘read’ their wider culture with the closeness and attention they give to a poem: this new kind of reading can make them much more critically aware of the ways in which their culture influences them and can give them the tools, if they so choose, to resist or embrace dominant trends in a given aspect of their culture. What must be kept in mind is that although cultural analyses are the most expansive kinds of response statements, they are not comprehensive. A good culture-centered response statement will open readers up to more possibilities than they can develop in a paper. But such a sense of multiplicity should not frustrate readers; it should rather help them to recognize the powerful and exciting options they have in reading texts.

8. Moving from response statements to formal papers Many of the strategies for writing cognitively and culturally aware response statements can be incorporated into the writing of a more formal paper. One of the strengths of the response statement is that it is tentative and explorative. Many students think that a formal paper, as opposed to a response statement must sound authoritative and objective. They assume that it ought to come to some definite conclusion that somehow transcends (or at least refuses to acknowledge) its own cultural situatedness. But once students learn that meanings of the same text change over time, that their ability to interpret a text in a particular way is a result of a complex conjunction of cultural and

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cognitive forces, can or should they return to writing formal papers, many of whose traditional conventions go against what they have learned? It is tempting for students to want to write a paper that sounds ‘objective’ because objectivity, at least for a first reading, appears authoritative, knowledgeable, and ‘correct’. Further, this is the kind of writing that they are probably most used to and the kind that they have been most rewarded for. A well-done traditional formal paper is conventionally a sign that a student had ‘mastered’ his or her subject. Is there a way to write a paper that presents an interesting and persuasive interpretation of a text without slipping back into writing truth-seeking, objective sounding prose? I wish to establish that the post-structuralist assumptions out of which the more complex types of response statements derive preclude the possibility of students’ writing traditional unself-conscious textbased papers. Nonetheless I recognize that without specific guidelines and reinforcements for writing different kinds of formal papers, they will probably find themselves slipping back into their old mode of writing, arguing that meaning is objectively contained in texts and ignoring the cognitive and cultural factors that influenced their reading of a text. The purpose of this section is to suggest, therefore, in very general terms, some alternative strategies and goals for writing formal papers. I will stress only four points about writing a formal paper. (1) A formal paper should be different from a response statement only in its coherence, detail, and persuasiveness, but in its methods of approaching the text. The theories and assumptions that motivate the guidelines for response statements apply equally to more formal papers. (2) The goals and strategies suggested for response statements are not only acceptable but, I believe, the most important ones students can have for a formal paper. In other words, for their paper, they do not have to determine what the meaning of a text is (which is, of course, one of the only acceptable goals for writing a traditional text-based paper). Rather, they can continue with the goal of analyzing how a text is able to have a certain meaning or meanings. They can, for example, choose to analyze such issues as the ways in which their reading strategies intersect with the text’s strategies; how their assumptions about a particular issue forced them to read the text in a particular way; how some aspect of their cultural background clashed with the text’s; how the text opens up multiple interpretive options. (3) Formal papers should present strong readings, not traditional interpretations. At first it may seem contradictory that, on the one hand, I argue that students should not attempt to write objective sounding papers, while on the other, I argue that they should present strong readings. This apparent contradiction is cleared up, however, when we explore what

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exactly a strong reading is and how significantly it differs from a traditional interpretation. Both can be argued forcefully and persuasively but there the similarity ends. A traditional interpretation asserts that it is ‘faithful’ to the text; a strong reading recognizes that it will to some extent always read the text ‘against the grain’. In order to be persuasive, a traditional interpretation frequently asserts that it provides the only correct reading of a text; a strong reading always acknowledges that it is only one of many possible readings. A strong reading derives its persuasiveness from analyzing in detail how particular aspects of the reader and the text intersected to create the strong reading. A strong reading explores the cognitive and cultural underpinnings of the reading experience; an interpretation hides them. A strong reading, therefore, while offering a particular interpretation of a text, focuses on the process of reading, on the strategies and assumptions necessary to form a certain reading; an interpretation focuses on the text. should read all texts with the same degree of cultural and (41 Students cognitive awareness. One kind of formal paper often required at the end of a term is the research paper. Like the methods of the traditional interpretation, the methods of the traditional research paper, such as summarizing critical approaches to a text and then selecting one view to the exclusion of the others as the basis of the student’s own analysis, work against the new model I have suggested. The traditional way of reading requires that students treat source texts as objectively true or false, rather than culturally situated. If, however, students read source texts with the same strategies they use with a literary text, they can establish a historical, cultural, and perhaps political context for these texts’ arguments. This can be done by investigating the time in which the texts were written; exploring the biases of the magazines, journals, or books in which they were published; analyzing the cultural and cognitive factors that influenced the writers’ positions. A student’s goal for reading source texts is changed, therefore, from reading passively to discover the author’s position to reading actively to investigate how the author’s position is influenced by his or her culture and how the student’s position and background intersects or clashes with the authors. Reading in this way can help to increase students’ interpretive options because the study of other writers’ cultural situatedness may cause students to expand their knowledge of their own. Consequently, when students come to write a formal paper, they can build on the discoveries they have made while writing their response statements. They will want to deepen their analysis of the issues involved - by rereading the text, carrying out research, reading criticism, developing their thinking on aspects of their own as well as the text’s general and literary repertoires - but they should not abandon the explorative nature of the response statement.

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They should not give up the emphasis on the interactive quality of reading, nor the cognitive and cultural awareness they have developed in their response statements. In fact, my experience is that a culturally and cognitively aware response statement can easily be extended into a formal paper. The main difference is that the issues discovered and raised in the response statement are analyzed in more depth and at greater length. Additional material may be included, but the self-aware, explorative nature of the response statement can remain the foundation of students’ formal papers. Response statements are not pre-writing exercises to be abandoned when something more ‘objective’ is needed. To say that reading and writing are interactive processes is to say nothing new. But to develop models in which either can be seen as an extension of the other and in which both are seen as influenced by the same factors ~ as I have attempted to do in this essay - may help students recognize the connectedness of these procedures and may provide some new and exciting situations in which we can observe our students as they engage in that endlessly complex process of reading and writing about literature.

References Althusser, L., 1971. Lenin and philosophy and other essays. (Transl. by B.B. Brewster) London: New Left Books. Balibar, E. and Pierre Macherey, 1981. On literature as ideological formation. In: R. Young (ed.), Untying the text: a post-structuralist reader, 79-99. Boston, MA: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Bartholomae, D., 1985. Inventing the university. In: M. Rose (ed.), When a writer can’t write, 134-165. New York: Guilford. Bennett, T., 1979. Marxism and formalism, London: Methuen. Bizzell, P., 1982. Cognition, convention, and certainty: what we need to know about writing. PRE/TEXT 3, 213-243. Bleich, D., 1978. Subjective criticism. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins. Eagleton, Terry, 1983. Literary theory: an introduction. Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota. Flower, L., in prep., Reading to write: exploring a cognitive and social process. Center for the Study of Writing at Carnegie Mellon. Flower, L., and J. Hayes, 1980. The cognition of discovery: defining a rhetorical problem. College Composition and Communication 31, 21-32. Flynn, E., 1983. Composing responses to literary texts: a process approach. College Composition and Communication 39, 342-348. Foucault, M., 1981. The order of discourse. In: R. Young (ed.), Untying the text: a post-structuralist reader, 48-78. Boston, MA: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Foucault, M., 1980. Power/knowledge. (Trans. by C. Gordon, L. Marshall, et al.) New York: Pantheon. Heath, S.B., 1983. Ways with words. New York: Cambridge University Press. Holland, N., 1975. 5 readers reading. New Haven, CT: Yale. McCormick, K., 1985. Theory in the reader: Bleich, Holland, and beyond. College English 47, 836-850.

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McCormick, K., in prep. The cultural imperatives underlying cognitive acts. Center for the Study of Writing at Carnegie Mellon. McCormick, K. and G. Waller, 1987. Text, reader, ideology: the interactive nature of the reading situation. Poetics 16, 193-208. McCormick, K. and G. Waller (with L. Flower), 1987. Reading texts, Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath. Richardson, R.C., Jr. et al., 1983. Literacy in the open-access college. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. Rohman, D.G., 1965. Pre-writing: the stage of discovery in the writing process. College Composition and Communication 16, 106-112. Schmidt, Siegfried J., 1985. On writing histories of literature: some remarks from a constructivist point of view. Poetics 14, 279-301. Stewart, D., 1969. Prose with integrity: a primary objective. College Composition and Communication 20, 223-227.