Conflicting Assumptions about Intention in Teaching Reading and Composition

Abstract

IT IS MY HOPE in this paper that by discussing a difficult relationship between rhetorical theory and literary theory a pedagogical problem might b)e better understood. As teachers of both reading and composition skills in college English departments, we sometimes find ourselves in an awkward position, straddling an epistemological fence. (I am using the hypothetical we, of course, to refer to no one in particular.) The awkwardness comes about because we teach reading, for the most part, by teaching the reading of literature, and we teach composition by teaching the w riting of expository and argumentative prose-non-fiction prose, in other words, which has a thesis. ()Our assumptions ab)out hows to read, and hence the implicit principles of the methodology we use to teach it, come to us primarily through our understanding of the problems and methods of literary analysis. Our assumptions about how to w rite, on the other hand, and hence the implicit principles of the methodology we use to teach it, come from our understanding of rhetoric. From this difference in the sources of our assumptions emerges a conflict, one which seems to indicate that the two activities of reading and composing, despite the lip-service we pay to their interdependence, are fundamentally contradictory. I am speaking of a conflict b)etw een the assumptions we seem to be forced to make a)out the nature of authorial intention and its role in the creative and critical act. On the one hand, we teach that an author's intention necessarily remains unknowable through interpretive procedures, and hence that it is inappropriate to deduce intention from effect: this is the intentional fallacy. ()n the other hand, we claim that intention is absolutely necessary to our understanding while writing, because the only hasis of our choices as we compose is our consistent sense of a purpose: this is thc intentional imperative. What is really a conflict between the reader's point of view and the writer's point of view can, then, seem to urge a distinction between the work of literature and the work of argumentation. It is this forced distinction w hich I wish to address ultimately in this paper by talking first about the consequences of these conflicting assumptions. It seems almost unnecessary to say that the validity of teaching w riting as a learnable skill rests on the assumption that students w ill have purposes to w hich they w ill desire to put language, and that their ability to control it w ill depend on their recog-